On The Morning Of A Massacre Of American Schoolchildren

Rita Ott Ramstad

Word Count 983

My students and I read Jim Daniels’s poem “American Cheese.” We have been working on distinguishing between what a poem is about (topic) and what it is really about (theme). My junior class of nearly all boys, students in a manufacturing and mechanical engineering program, knows the poem is about more than cheese, but they are having a hard time getting past the seeming triviality of the speaker’s snack preferences.

“You know, they can’t even call it cheese,” one student offers. “They’re called Kraft Singles because it’s not technically cheese,” he says.

“Let’s back up,” I suggest. “What is the poem saying literally?”

They establish facts: The speaker attends department parties with fancy cheeses that he’s come to like. He feels OK about that. He grew up near a factory. As a kid, he ate American cheese, the stuff that comes in individual, plastic-wrapped squares. His dad worked in the factory. There were five kids in the family. They ate American cheese sandwiches. When he visits home now, he craves American cheese, and his mother is surprised that he eats it without bread.

They skip over the poem’s only metaphorical lines:

…We were sparrows and starlings

still learning how the blue jay stole our eggs,

our nest eggs…

For weeks, “this is about/this is really about” has been our path into determining meanings that go beyond the literal. Having established together what the poem is about, I send them into small groups to discuss what the poem is really about. When we come back together to share ideas they circle round and round above the poem, talking about food, nostalgia, and family, but never landing on the lines about birds. I say little, but in response to one idea I ask, “Does everything in the poem make sense with that?”

The answer is no, and only then, finally, does someone ask what those lines about the birds mean.

“Think about how we use our background knowledge and own experiences to make meaning of a text,” I suggest. “What do you know about these kinds of birds, and how can that knowledge give you ideas about what the poem is saying?”

Silence.

I back us up again. “How about sparrows and starlings?” I ask. “What do you know about those birds?”

A mulleted boy who rarely turns in assignments and regularly wears clothing adorned with American iconography says, “They’re scrub birds.”

“Can you say more about that?”

“They’re, like, nothing birds,” he says. “No one cares about them.”

“And what about blue jays?” I ask. “What do you know about them?”

“They’re cool.”

“Why?”

“They’re big and blue. They’re beautiful birds.”

“They are,” I agree.

“Here’s a great example,” I say to everyone, “of how two people might form different interpretations of the same text. One person sees blue jays as better than sparrows and starlings, who are small, unremarkable. Jays are stronger and much more distinctive–beautiful. But I have other ideas about the birds because of an experience I had.”

I then tell them about the time I watched a blue jay attack a nest in branches outside my bedroom window. I tell them about the sounds the smaller parent birds made as their hatchlings were killed, and how they never returned to the nest once the blue jay left it. “Blue jays are birds that attack other birds,” I say, “and because of my experience, that is an important fact about them that shapes how I interpret the poem.”

Now that our associations with the birds have turned the key of these lines, the poem unlocks. Yes, it is about food, family, and nostalgia, but now they see that it is also about social class, culture, pride, community, hard choices, and survival. A robust discussion of what the poem is really saying ensues. We reach no consensus, which is fine. That wasn’t the point of the lesson.

Later, as my students are gathering their things at the end of class, the boy who shared his ideas about the birds says to me, “I liked class today.”

“I’m glad,” I say, and I am, knowing that many days he does not. Our current unit is one in which I have asked them to read books that provide windows into the lives of characters who are different from them in some significant way. He doesn’t like the assignment.

“I appreciated your contributions to our discussion,” I add.

“Thanks,” he says, and he smiles at me. I smile back, hoping he knows that I mean it, that I’m not just saying words because they are ones a good teacher would say.

We have no way of knowing, then, what the afternoon will bring. I don’t know that after school, while I’m waiting for the copy machine, another teacher will ask if I’ve heard about the latest school shooting.

“It’s a bad one,” she will say.

I don’t know that I will run my copies without saying anything, or that it will not be until I am back in my classroom, alone and unable to focus on preparing for the next day’s lesson, that I will search online to find out where, how many, and who. I don’t know that I will close my laptop and spend long minutes examining the nest I’ve built for us, with its twinkle lights, art posters, chart paper, and lists of class discussion agreements. I don’t know that I will stare at the day’s learning targets on the whiteboard while remembering the September morning we began building those agreements as we analyzed gun control memes. I don’t know that it will be the chirping laughter of students playing ping-pong in the main lobby while they wait for their rides home that will bring me back to the present, or that the pock-pock-pock of the balls hitting their paddles will be the thing that finally, this time, brings me to tears.

Rita lives in Portland, Oregon, where she was a K-12 educator for more than 30 years. Her first publication was a poem in Seventeenmagazine, and her book, The Play of Dark and Light, won the Oregon Book Award for poetry in 2003. Since 2009, her writing has appeared in a series of personal blogs, most recently at https://rootsie.substack.com/ She returned to figure skating in 2022 after a 45-year break, an experience that has inspired her to again pursue traditional publication. In both skating and writing, her ambition is to do simple things gracefully.