The Palestine Literature Festival, part II

Tonight I experienced a few firsts at the Palestine Literature Festival's closing night.

- I heard a Nobel laureate read his own writing, part of a short story about threshing floors in South Africa. The writer was JM Coetzee and the venue was the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center Garden, which was so full people were sitting on banisters, stone walls, and (like me) the ground under the green lighted fig tree. I found the story fascinating for the way it revealed the mystery of language for a young person trying to make sense of the world. I'll write about that separately.

- I heard a first-hand account of what it was like for one black American woman to travel the route of the slave trade through Ghana. The poet was Saidiya Hartman, and I never wanted her to stop speaking, even though her message was thoroughly discomforting. 

- I heard spoken word Palestinina Poetry live for the first time! I've only ever seen videos like this one of this locally revered form of non-violent resistance, and tonight a Palestinian American poet from Brooklyn, Ali Abuajamieh, delivered three of his poems on the stage. 

- I felt the tiny hands of a Palestinian baby pressed onto my leg. What looked to me like a 10 or 11 month old, with a choo-choo- in his mouth, was on his mother's in the parched grass next to me. Occasionally he would fall onto me, pushing his tiny might onto my thigh or grasping my sweater sleeve in an attempt to steady himself, or to get my attention, I don't know. 

Some of the crowd at the KSCC tonight, under the green lighted fig tree.

You can tell from the bullet points above that this lit fest was truly international in nature. Coetzee grew up in South Africa during Apartheid, and Hartman has Ghanaian roots but lives in New York now. Abuajamieh's parents are from Jaffa and Haifa (towns now inside the state of Israel, to which Palestinians without specific i.d. can't go). 

Last week on their final, the 11th graders were asked what makes interpreting a play different from interpreting a poem. Many of them asked for clarification during the exam, and I had several mini conversations with students asking where they encounter plays, and what is involved in their experience of a play. The performance aspect, the fast pace, not controlled by the reader, the expressions and intonations of the actor, the choices of the director. All these elements came up in these brief exchanges. 

Tonight the readings combined these two genres, poetry and theatre, as the tone and expression of the reader, and his or her pace, influenced my understanding. There is something special about hearing literature read, since it is so ephemeral. A beautiful sentence, once heard, hangs in my mind like smoke after a flame is blown out - it bespeaks the beauty of what was there just a second ago, and this remnant will inevitably dissipate within the next few seconds; I probably wouldn't be able to repeat the beautiful sentence if I wanted to. I can't go back to it, I can only smile in the warm ambient glow it's left in my mind.

A crummy photo of Abuajamieh, a spoken word poet

This happened several times with Hartman's readings, which come from her book Lose Your Mother, A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. She described going to Ghana and feeling so thoroughly a foreigner. Her accounts of being identified and referred to as "outsider" (I forget the Ghanaian word) made me think of what it feels like to stick out so markedly on the street here, and how much my sister Tess stuck out when serving in Peace Corps Cameroon. 

What made Hartman's message poignant though, was that she had left the US looking for her true "home", and arrived in Ghana only to be made to feel thoroughly foreign, though in a different way than she is in the US. 

She described the horrific experience of walking through the "dungeons", the holding cells for slaves, where the ground is literally composed of the compacted remains of humans. She spoke of the euphemism of the phrase slave trade, which implies mutual benefit, and mutual consent. I had never thought about that specific word and how positive its connotation is in our pro-market society, and how inappropriate it is to describe the coercion of slavery. 

She also talked about litter in a fascinating way. She said, garbage is the point of conjunction between the living and the dead. It is the remnant of what has been life, and what is now dead. It struck me as an astute observation; "trash" epitomises both the presence of life and the triumph of death. 

There are certain images she saw during her pilgrimage that she "rejected". She rejected the reality of walking on the remains of those who had suffered generations before. I wonder if we can actually reject a reality with which we are faced. I'm not talking about a question of self-delusion, which can be the result of cultural narrative ingrained in us since a young age. I mean, when we encounter a situation that disturbs us, can we block it out? 

It surely depends on the person, just as whether we are affected by a horror movie depends on our constitution. Have I ever decided to reject something? I'll have to think about that. Have you?

The Palestine Literature Festival

Last night was the opening event of the Palestine Literature Festival at the Ottoman Court. The amphitheater was full, and the crowd was beautiful. The young, hip, partially-westernized but proudly Palestinian crowd was out in force, plus a slew of Western transplants, and us short-termers. Here is the bio of the first woman who spoke. I'm trying to figure out how to put in an audio file of her voice, which was incredible. If you have never been exposed to formal Arabic, her poem would have been a good place to start! 

Asmaa Azaizeh was born in the village of Duburiya in Palestine’s Southern Galilee region, in 1985. She is a TV correspondent and presenter for the London-based channel al Ghad al Araby. She has written for various Palestinian and Arab publications alongside working with various cultural initiatives. Her first collection of poetry, Liwa, was published in 2011 and won the AM Qattan prize. Her second collection As the Woman From Lydd Gave Birth To Me is forthcoming. She has contributed to anthologies, magazines, and festivals around the world. Her poems have been translated into English, German, Swedish, French, Dutch, Italian, and Persian. 

The program of the festival had this introduction to the nature of the festival: 

"Staging a travelling literary festival in Palestine is certainly a challenge, but we can't imagine PaleFest working any other way. As our international guests move from the weaponised economics of Ramallah through the siege of Jerusalem to the evisceration of Al Khalil and the ruins of Ein Hod they understand the different aspects of the occupation. In each city we work with our partner organisations and some of the finest voices in Palestin'e irrepressible literary scene to produce a series of unique events. In besieged Gaza, artists based there will also deliver events under the PaleFest banner." 

While I waited for the event to begin, between sessions of staring at the people around me, I read about another poet whom I'd never read or even heard of: Wallace Stevens. 

The idea of a two-faced person has come up often in the literature classroom this year, from Dr. Ridgeon in Doctor's Dilemma, and Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi (not the mention the Duchess herself, in a softer sense, when she lies to her brothers, and to herself in telling Antonio that everything will be OK after their marriage), to Lady Macbeth and Macbeth, who show remarkable bravado but also have lines that reveal intense fear and uncertainty. Wallace Stevens brings another meaning to the idea of "two faced," a less pejorative meaning. He was an insurance trader during the day, and, according to Schjeldahl, (I just had to write that name) "the quintessential American poet of the twentieth century".

It makes me sad to think of men with literary passion and genius being contained in suburban lives and day jobs, roles foisted upon them by social expectation. Stevens apparently struggled with depression his whole life. What if such men were encouraged by society to pursue their literary passion with abandon? What if they were allowed to live the way Gabriel Garcia Marquez did in his early years as a writer, as described by him, in Bogota, Colombia, surrounded by the literary heavy weights of his day? Perhaps then, Wallace might have had as significant a role in the American public life as Marquez did toward the end of his life (as described here by my favourite profile writer.) If we allowed more people to gain legitimacy as a non-politicised "voice of the nation," the political discussion might take on broader scope. 

One of Stevens's poems is "Sunday Morning", whose first stanza is below: 

I. 

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late 

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, 

And the green freedom of a cockatoo 

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate 

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. 

She dreams a little, and she feels the dark 

Encroachment of that old catastrophe, 

As a calm darkens among water-lights. 

The pungent oranges and bright, green wings 

Seem things in some procession of the dead, 

Winding across wide water, without sound. 

The day is like wide water, without sound, 

Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet 

Over the seas, to silent Palestine, 

Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

Hm. For me this stanza evokes the contradiction between the magnificent luxury and beauty of our (my) lives, and past suffering of which we should be recognisant of on a Sunday morning, whether in a service full of pomp and circumstance or in Quaker silence. We ought to dwell on those who have less, who are suffering, who are in need of prayers, even as we enjoy "late coffee" (like I'm having at La Vie cafe right now) and "oranges in a sunny chair." The elements of our heavenly morning "mingle to dissipate the holy hush of ancient sacrifice." Indeed, Christ's suffering is a silent mist that wafts through my Sunday morning mind while I "dream a little" of my wonderful future life (at Earlham, teaching literature, visiting new places, meeting new people). The "encroachment of that old catastrophe" threatens our easiness, and is actually not so old, since injustice is really only ever down the road.

The "wide water", "without sound", at first may seem a buffer zone, separating me from the procession of the dead. Indeed my very luxurious day is like "wide water". But I (like Christ!) am able to walk across it, "to silent Palestine". The proximity of my dreams to the "dominion of the blood and sepulchre" is emphasised again. Those two realities are too close for comfort on a Sunday morning, I think.

On another note, and with a half smile, I take issue with the description of Palestine as silent. It is many things, but not silent. 

- children shouting at a table on the other side of the garden, 

- the chickens in the back garden crowing, 

- cars honking while they watch someone try to drive over a sidewalk, 

- some sort of amplified auction going on (has been for over an hour) in the next building, with one of those mikes that reverberates the voice of the speaker

- the Palestinian folk music on the sound system at this cafe, 

- and the call to prayer. 

- This morning the construction site next to my house started up at 6:30 with someone sanding the side of the building, or that's what it looked like from my vantage point

Important events, and Didier Barbelivien

Tonight I was tutoring A. We are in a mad rush of five sessions this week to prepare him for his exam on Monday. Yesterday we reviewed the story of Ashputtle, a strange story because it's the original Cinderella (you can see why the folks at Disney changed her name), and therefore strikes the students (and me) as infantile and uninteresting.

Tonight we reviewed the excerpt that his class read of "The Titanic". After plotting the story's events and characters on a worksheet, discussing the role of suspense in the story, and the possible themes ("build enough lifeboats" is what he wrote on the paper) A said:

"Do you think the Titanic was the most important event in the world?"

I answered in the negative, and he asked why. I thought of the book "The 100", which identifies the 100 most influential people in the world. The introduction of that book, (which I read one day in Powell Books in Portland, OR), between its efforts to preemtively dodge inevitable criticism for its impossible (but fascinating) project, clarifies that the author considers an event's importance in terms of how significantly life on earth changed after that person lived.

The apostle Paul is on the list, because after his life, so many people converted to the new religion which would change the face of civilisation. Louis Pasteur is on the list, since after his discovery of how to make milk safer to drink, nutrition changed.

In position number 1 is the prophet Mohammad.

I started saying to A that there had been other events that had had a bigger impact on the world. Perhaps after the Titanic sank there were fewer people, and ship builders started making sure that they had enough life boats for all passengers on board. "But think about other events, like the birth of the prophet Mohammad." (He didn't know the word prophet, so it took us a while to establish which of the billion Mohammad's I was referring to.)

"So many people's lives were changed by the Prophet's life, right?"
"Yeah." He looked engaged and nodded through my whole discussion of what made an event important. I used another example, in which my phone broke. That wasn't going to change the way we live here on earth. But there are such events.

At the end, I said, "Does that make sense?" and he said:

"Yeah. So, if the prophet Mohammad hadn't been born, the Titanic wouldn't have hit the ice berg?"

Earlier in the day, I had been reading The Courage to Teach, by Parker Palmer, which is one of the books assigned for the MAT program I'm starting in June. The chapter I read today spoke of the importance of mentor teachers. Thus I had already made a list today of Monica's traits that I found admirable and aspired to. Here was an opportunity to practice "never making fun of or laughing at a child", which figured high on the list, right below "patience".

I tried to look contemplative for a moment, then said, "Well, I wouldn't say that. But I would say that the Prophet's birth had more impact on earth than the tragedy of the Titanic." He nodded, satisfied, pride intact.


On the way home from tutoring, the taxi, which usually plays Arabic pop, had this intriguing and insufferable track blaring:

I wondered if the driver were trying to humour me, because I have short hair, or whether he is French-Arab. I didn't ask, but smiled the whole way home. 

Lives in process

The short story "The Lady with the Dog," by Anton Chekhov, draws the reader along without relying on traditional plot conventions, like a clear conflict or problem, a climax, or a resolution. It is the story of a man who falls in love with a woman while he's on vacation in Yalta, on the Black Sea. Initially, he doesn't think the attachment is particularly strong, as he has had other affairs before that have been flashes in the pan. But when he goes home, he can't free his mind of Anna, and eventually goes to her city. They continue the affair, but it is not a joyous relationship. They love each other, but by the end both parties realise that they are in for a long and arduous trek. The story ends like this:

"And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning."

I read this story this morning, and then looked up commentary on it. Apparently it's one of the most influential stories ever written. Chekhov had massive impact on the 20th century, and was called in the secondary sources I found this morning the father of modern theatre and short story. TLWTD epitomises what set his fiction apart, and it was indeed this flouting of convention, particularly the lack of resolved ending. He was one of the first to bring fiction into line with the more realistic rhythms of human life, which never reach a point of closure, as each ending is, just as what is written above indicates, the beginning of the next chapter. 

But even chapter is the wrong word. Chapters are discreet from one another, not overlapping. My next chapter, in Indiana, has already begun, in my mind, and in my duties (health forms, scholarship applications, pre-readings, housing arrangements) while the RFS chapter lives on in my physical realm. The students are in their exam chapters, but the twelfth graders are living, to some degree, in their chosen locations for college next year, and 11th graders are trying on seniorhood. 

The Chekhov story is not concerned with preserving or memorialising the past in any way. Each step of human life moves smoothly on, and there is hardly a backward glance. Such was not the case with the Nakba day activities yesterday on campus, which sought to remind students of the war in 1948 when their parents and grandparents were driven from their homes by the new citizens of Israel. The courtyard had refugee tents on it; inside photo displays showed towns that had been left behind and occupied by Israelis; the symbol of the key was dominant, the key which will unlock these territories and allow Palestinians to return to their home land. 

Images of Arab culture in Palestine from before 1948 move me because they show such a normal looking society. Peaceful, and so similar in rhythm and habit to the community I grew up in. That was less than 70 years ago, but how things have changed. 

Here's Y dressed in thob, the traditional embroidered Palestinian dress, using a real stone grinder which was used for grains and lentils. 

Another Y showed me around the exhibit, explaining the Arabic labels. 

In Need of Grace

I wrote that Thursday was the last day of classes, but after a quick decision by the administration, we had four periods of class this morning. I pulled out an unseen passage that I have written about already when two other sections looked at it in October. It's a passage by Yashar Kemal, a striking portrayal of a human body, laid to ill-at-ease rest next to a river. It appears that the man died violently and uncomfortably, either at the hands of nature or another human, we never learn. 

The natural elements around him pay him little mind, and time moves steadily onward, as the sun rises, drawing a bitter smell from the burdock shrubs, warming the earth, and causing the plane trees to shine wetly. The violence of the death doesn't distinguish it. Nature responds as it would had the man simply lain down and expired. 

It makes me feel, as a human, as though my sentimental urges and tendency to dramatise what I see seem an anomaly in natural process, and an attempt to hold back the tide of life instead of moving on as quickly as the minnows skitter off to "rally against the next instant". Here's the passage:



He lay mouth up on the bank, a long, long body with his arms and legs spreadeagled. Beside him a wide pool of blood had soaked into the ground and dried into a crust. His striped shirt was torn from his right shoulder down and a dark streak of hairy chest showed through like a festering wound in the sun. On the left side of the shirt the blood had hardened into a large patch as stiff as a block of wood. Midges swarmed over his face, fighting for his eyes, and now and then a bright-winged green fly whizzed by, slashing through the sunlight like a long flash of lightning. His hands lay wide open, huge wet hands. The pebbles, the dusty burdock shrubs, the tamarisks, the laurels, the plane trees shone wetly as the sun rose. His grey hair fell over his forehead. His head, half sunk in the stream, lay pillowed against a large striated stone. Shoals of tiny fish skimmed up, sniffing at his right ear, then swam off like quicksilver to rally against the next instant. The sluggish river flowed, crystal-clear in the sunlight, its polished green-lichened stones bright as darting fish. The sun was higher now, warming up the earth. A bitter smell rose from the burdock shrubs as the sultry heat sank deeper into the water, the trees and the grass.


                                            Yashar Kamal The Undying Grass 1968


I feel strangely this afternoon, after my real final class. I feel an intense sense of inadequacy thinking about what I accomplished in that classroom today, and more broadly for my students. It sounds like I'm fishing for affirmation, but I'm not really. I just feel overwhelmed by the certainty that I failed many times to do something good, that I failed several times to engage students or respond appropriately to their questions or comments. 

More heavily, I feel I've actually hurt them with things I've said, with comments I haven't countered, with texts I've shown them, and attitudes I've displayed. It feels crummy. I feel as a foreigner I may have increased the gulf of distrust or the perception of unconquerable misperception between east and west. 

I feel ill-equipped to be any kind of liaison between here and the US when I return. I feel in need of grace for whatever transgressions I've committed in that classroom; I feel the weight of all the injustices, small or large, known and unknown to me, that I've perpetrated. 

From the Capital Church online bulletin

I found a reminder of that grace this afternoon in a sermon in a podcast from Capital Church in Salt Lake City, UT. This message (number seventy in this list), from pastor Troy Champ, is entitled The World's Greatest Sinner, and talks about Paul's writings in Timothy about what a first rate sinner Paul was before he started devoting his life to spreading Christ's message of love: he persecuted early Christians, and quite effectively. He says, in essence, in God's grace was large enough to encompass and indeed overwhelm my sin, then it's large and powerful enough to overwhelm anyone's past.


I haven't often found these assurances of God's grace compelling because a) I shrink from an emphasis on the sinful nature of humans and b) I have no sordid past that I carry like an albatross. But today, I feel, not the albatross, but some form of burden from what lines I, and probably all teachers, have crossed in the classroom. So I was moved by Paul's words in 1 Timothy: (This is the Message paraphrase)


"I'm so grateful to Christ Jesus for making me adequate to do this work. He went out on a limb, you know, in trusting me with this ministry. The only credentials I brought to it were invective, and witch hunts and arrogance. But I was treated mercifully because I didn't know what I was doing - didn't know who I was doing it against! Grace mixed with faith and love poured over me and into me." (1 Tim. 1:12=15)



While I don't think I went as far as witch hunting, there was certainly arrogance in my teaching at times. Arrogance, and fear, and pride, and misplaced frustration, and righteous indignation. Those are all harmful as well. This reassurance this afternoon did me good - that God did indeed go out on a limb in bringing me here, and apparently did so in the full knowledge of what I would do once on the ground. And that, because "I had no idea what I was doing," I was blessed with grace and the spirit which I felt so often pour over me.


I have this fantasy that when I go to complete the MAT program at Earlham College in May, I'll progress past my insecurities and doubts about my teaching abilities. I'll figure it out, and be able to be in the classroom without committing errors that leave collateral damage. In fact, that collateral damage is probably one of the hazards of teaching (or of most kinds of work) and coming to terms with inevitable blunders and harmful missteps will be part of my acceptance of self as imperfect. I can only pray for the willingness to stay honest and apologise where I realise that I've been in the wrong.

Weekend Reading

On last weekend's reading list was A Doll's House. This weekend, I'm reading Donn Huchison's When I was a Girl and Not Very Pretty. This is a self-published novel, the first in a series of seven, that follows a Palestinian family saga through several generations from the early 20th century to the present. 

Part I, which I have just started, tells the story of Salma, who, very young, marries Abdullah, and proceeds to bear him 19 children, fifteen of whom die before they are one, and the last of whom, Hasna, has red hair and blue eyes, making her anathema to her father, and the object of much ridicule from her sisters in law. The story is bleak, but beautifully told, and it weaves much historical detail into the narrative. The narrator is removed, but the characters are rendered lovingly. 


Find his book (I'm reading the kindle version) here.

I had tea at Donn's house on Tuesday, and we spoke about how, when reading about past eras, injustices stick out egregiously to us (like Abdullah's blatant disregard for his daughter and ubiquitous preference for male children, or the stigmatisation of someone who doesn't look exactly like everyone else). It's tempting to settle back in the armchair and sigh a satisfied "well, thank goodness it's no longer like that." But upon reflection, the break with past practices is rarely as clean as we would like to believe. 

After reading the chapter about how enthusiastically Salma's community responded to the birth of a son, compared to the rueful looks and disparaging comments mothers of newborn girls got, I thought "Thank goodness I live in a time when I'm not judged by the fact that I was born a girl, and won't be judged for having a girl myself." Not ten minutes after this self-satisfied meditation, I read the following email from a friend, announcing the sex of an unborn cousin:

Johnson name continues.

Baby I is going to be a boy!

This email simultaneously affirms that two norms of Salma's time are alive and well in the 21st century. 

1) The importance of men to carry the family name on, to proudly bear the legacy of men who have come before him. 

2) The expectation that more babies will follow!

There is nothing wrong with these norms, necessarily. The point is that I can't pretend that I'm a modern, better and improved human to the extent that my ego would like. 

The last day of class

It feels quite surreal that today was the last day of classes. I don't want to say goodbye to the classroom. I'll miss the continuous challenge, surprise and delight of what these students bring to the table. I'll miss the way they turn to the class in discussion and say "Shu yani..." ("how do you say...") and conduct a five second discussion to find the right English word before continuing their thoughts. I love that they have this entirely teacher-less process, to which I am witness but cannot be privy, since I don't speak Arabic. I love that it's their thing - that it's an opportunity to practice the concept "It's ok not to know" and it's an opportunity for other students to be directly involved in their classmates' thoughts and responses. Usually, the students that have been listening, know exactly what word the person is looking for, even when several words could be synonyms.

I'll miss that. I'll miss how active this class is about learning - how they so willingly become invested in the story and characters. I recall that moment in Macbeth when Seyton comes on stage in Act V after Macbeth observes that he has "supped full of horrors" and has "forgotten the taste of fears", and Seyton states, simply: "The queen, my lord, is dead."

The class was up in arms. "Miss! Lady Macbeth dies? When? Why? Where? WHY? MISS!" It was fantastic. I don't dare hope that all classes will be similarly willing to thrust themselves into literature so fully.

Today continued their inventive and magnificent comments. I posed this question at the beginning of class for discussion in pairs.

Think of a moment from Macbeth and a moment from the Ted Hughes poetry that seem, to you, somehow related.

Here are some of the notes, and I'll explain what each student said.

Things once normal become strange: Z and M talked about how in "The Owl" the speaker's world is at first normal, but seen through the eyes of the owl (depending on your interpretation), the world takes on a foreign and bizarre, otherworldly quality. They connected that moment to the night after Macbeth kills King Duncan, when weak owls attack strong falcons, where night continues into the day time, and horses rebel against their owners and eat each other. Things suddenly are bizarre and unnatural.

Building on the idea of chaos in nature, Y and D had great ideas comparing this distortion of natural systems in nature with the distortion of nature in "Wind". Y said, in "Wind," the chaos and wild events taking place during the storm are scary and threatening, but still, it's just nature going about it's normal course. In Macbeth, the chaos in nature is unnatural, and truly disturbing, as opposed to just scary. One gets the sense in Macbeth that the chaos represents a true violation of nature, not just a violent side of nature. It was so excellent!

N built even more on this point, saying, the chaos in "Wind" is created by nature, and it makes the humans afraid. In Macbeth, the chaos is caused by a human. She pointed out that we are afraid and uncomfortable with chaos and lack of calm when it's caused by something outside of us (nature) but we are apt to create chaos ourselves in the human world. I was so impressed.

The other great point made was about being encaged, and being unable to escape. J spoke quite coherently about how the Jaguar is encaged by outer oppressors, and cannot escape because of the physical bars around him. Macbeth, though, is also unable to escape, but the thing keeping him trapped is his own past, his own sinful actions. He is also lonely because of the secret that he's trying to keep hidden (that he killed the king) while the Jaguar is lonely because he seems to be the only animal who knows about freedom - the apes, parrots, and lion and tiger seem to have forgotten. So his "secret" ("there's more to life than this zoo") also keeps him lonely.

I will miss this. I will miss beaming at them during such conversations, thrilled to be hearing their brains in action.

Sitting here, at this cafe, drinking arabic coffee, swatting the dozen flies that seem to have chosen my table while leaving all others untouched, holding my breath as clouds of argila smoke engulf my table every 20 seconds, I am very glad that I'll be back in the classroom soon. Well, I'm also terrified of starting again in a new class. My current students are like extended family that I can joke with and push just the right amount for them; whose writing I know well, and can say as I did in a writing conference this morning, "A, you're a straight forward guy. You like things to be clear and follow a predictable, logical order. Is that right?" and already know that I was right. That comfort is so comfortable. 

But the process of getting there has also been exciting too. I remember writing to my colleague William at the beginning of the year and exclaiming that the students that had moved from his tenth grade class into my eleventh grade class were wonderful. I gave my first impressions of them, and said how cool it was to have them in class. So even at that point, getting to know their personalities was rewarding. 

Still, the idea of standing in front of a new classroom and having to start from square 1 with expectations, classroom norms and attitudes toward literature, not knowing who in the class will be the kind of person to challenge my authority, to challenge my knowledge, to challenge my deadlines... is frightening. But it's the kind of frightening that also makes me smile. As in, ok, let's do it.