On Finishing

I work, now, with not-yet teachers at a university and the students often ask me questions as though I know the answer.

What do you do, one of them said one day, when a student isn’t finished?

Is it important that the student finish? I responded.

It was the strangest feeling. The sudden deep quiet. It was like I had set off a bomb in the classroom and everyone was staring in shock at the wreckage.

What did I wreck?

The student finally spoke into the hush. But, she said, isn’t finishing necessary? Won’t students just do nothing if we say they don’t have to finish?

A thousand words pushed forward, rushing to be said, but I settled at last on asking, is what they are doing worth finishing?

And suddenly the hush was gone. The room filled with a rising murmur, students thinking together about worksheets and projects, reports and assignments, about too hard and too easy, about perseverance and laziness, about anxiety and eagerness.

I was thinking about the small taken-for-granted ideas that have deep roots in our classrooms, that despite our planting new ideas, grow and flourish in the warm dark behind closed doors.

I think of all the children I have known who gave up entirely, who sat and did nothing at all, because they could never finish, or at least not in the way that was required in the time allotted.

Poet Rita Dove said, “What a poem does is open something up inside. This is also a good feeling. A poem is an experience, because when you experience, it allows you to become larger.” There is no poetry in closing, in making small, in turning invisible.

I don’t want students to finish; I want them to want to finish, that straining to reach the not quite-reachable summit, the ah, the awe of it, when after hours of cross-outs and almost giving up, a word slips suddenly into place, the sketch, offered with glowing eyes, because even though the tree leans drunkenly, the almost perfect house is perched, just as imagined, upon the hillside. The delight, even here, in this moment (so many deletions later), this small, “yes, that’s what I mean.” Almost.