Teachers inspire me.

A poem given to us at our last department meeting.  

After almost two full hours of debate and complaining and whining and griping (sometimes rightfully) about anything and everything that needs to get accomplished but can't because we are only human and can only be expected to do so much, I am so grateful to have received this piece of writing.  

Its simplicity and poignancy reminded me why I do this.  It's not the CAPT scores or the piles of  college recommendations or papers or duties or web portals or professional objectives or whatever else's.  It's the students sitting in front of us.  It is the faint recognition, the pieces of me I see sitting in front of me.  It is the lessons I struggled so hard to learn.  It is the lessons I learned the wrong way.  It is the passion I had then that was stifled too early.  It is the purity and innocence I see before me.  And before that innocence is lost, I want to do something, say something, or not say something to help that purity become what is possible.  

Even though I am tired everyday, I don't regret a second I spend with my students, for my students, because of my students.  This is a life choice.  This is dedication.  This is for them.  Because I was them, and if it weren't for a very small few, I might not have become the me I am now.  

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in my first year, when i teach geography to seventh graders,

one little girl's voice faintly

reminds me of one of my college friends and

i almost give her an A just because she's an echo

of someone who formed a vital layer in me.

over the years I have more students who drift into 

reminders of people in my past;

sometimes I recognize the resemblance immediately,

like the profile of the low appalachian ridge outside the window,

and sometimes it hits me mid-year and,

having created the borders of the connection, 

i then chart the inlands,

embellish and illuminate mountains, floodplains, and

valleys with memory.

i wonder if we all listen to our students for echoes--

in the lilt of a laugh, or how one's hair parts in the middle,

like the friend we had in thenth grade

who wore mega-sweaters and leggings.

or in the turn of a phrase,

the cadence of a question,

the way a hand is slowly raised like the long neck of a dinosaur

in those long-ago science hand-outs,

that smelled like sweet cereal and purple ink.

each september it's as if we have a new chance

to fumble through the past, 

to listen for echoes of ourselves that inexorably decay 

as they resonate and ripple

off the earthtone and crumbly layers

of time, of characters in books, of friends and old lovers--

--and sometimes of the dead,

who we unearth for an hour or so each day; 

time enough to quietly say hello,

how you doing?  I'm glad you're still with me

in this young mind sitting across the canyon, across the great divide.

--Simao J. A. Drew  (teaches literature and language at Liberty High School in Eldersburg, Maryland, and is a member of the adjunct faculty at Frederick Community College.  At the Gifted and Talented Summer Centers sponsored by the Maryland State Department of Education, he teaches creative writing.  His poems have appeared in literary magazines including Scarab and Sandstone Review.)