Intrator, Sam M. & Scribner, Megan, editors. (2003)
Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach.
San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Teaching with fire: Poetry that sustains the courage to teach, edited by Sam M. Intrator and Megan Scribner, and published by Jossey-Bass in 2003, is a wonderful little book. If you are feeling discouraged about your teaching life, if you need to remember why you went into this field, if you want to hear from teachers about the ways in which they help themselves continue to teach with passion, be sure to pick this book up.
The editors of this book asked teachers to send in their most beloved poems, and then to explain why they loved those poems. College professors, principals, elementary school teachers, organizational consultants, high school teacher-development-coordinators, college presidents, retired middle school teachers, and poets-in-the-schools coordinators; teachers from Indiana and Israel, from Oregon and Ohio, teachers whose names you’ll recognize and those whose names you won’t, all sent the editors the poems that have sustained them through their years of teaching. The book contains eighty-eight beautiful poems by such diverse writers as John Milton and Galway Kinnell, by young writers like Barbara Kingsolver, Billy Collins, and Li-Young Lee; by classical writers like T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and E.E. Cummings; by female writers like Mary Oliver, Margaret Walker, and Marge Piercy; by Langston Hughes and Pablo Neruda, Rilke and Nikki Giovanni and Rabindranath Tagore. The book contains poems by writers I’ve never heard of, who may not even be well-published poets yet, like Bettye T. Spinner and Judy Brown. Each poem is introduced by the teacher who sent it in; each introduction is personal, reflective, surprising.
The book is broken up into sections: “Hearing the Call” and “Cherishing the Work” are the first two sections; in these, poems reflect reasons teachers chose the profession. The titles of the poems in the first section of the book give glimpses of teachers’ reasons for entering the field: “To be of use” by Marge Piercy, “The Way It Is,” by William Stafford, and, by Marion Wright Edelman, the wonderful prayer, “I care and I’m willing to serve.” In the section called “Cherishing the Work” are poems that remind teachers of their successes, of the wonder of language, and of the messages these teachers want their students to take away with them when they leave the classroom.
The next two sections of the book, “On the Edge” and “Holding On” remind readers of the price students must pay for teachers’ failures, and help encourage teachers to take risks in their work. In these sections, an Israeli teacher explains why she rereads Yehuda Amichai’s searing poem “God has Pity on Kindergarten Children” to her classful of teachers-in-training each year; an elementary school teacher describes how he uses Billy Collins’ poem “On Turning Ten” to remind himself of the reality of the lives of the children he works with, a high school English teacher tells how Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” grounds her and consoles her in her teaching life, and why she keeps the poem on her classroom door.
The middle sections, “In the Moment” and “Making Contact,” contain poems that help teachers remember how important relationship is in teaching, and how important it is for teachers to keep growing. In this section a teacher describes how she used Neruda’s poem “Keeping Quiet” with her students after 9/11; another reminisces about a retreat in Singapore, and how Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Shoulders” helps her remember the importance of our caring for each other; a teacher in the Poets-in-the-Schools program explains how he uses a Gary Snyder poem both to help him teach writing and to remind him of the importance of the “hard pleasant tasks” of teaching.
After a section called “Daring to Lead,” in which poems encourage teachers to work to make schools more caring, humane, and just places, the book ends with a wonderful essay by Sam M. Intrator, called “The Utility of Poetry in a Teacher’s Life.” In this essay, Intrator reminds teachers of the uses of poetry in their lives and in their classrooms. In “Poetry in Service of Turning Inward,” he suggests that teachers remember that good poems can be playful, not only solemn; he reminds us that poems can be a daily gift (and provides web sites where readers can get a ‘daily fix’ of poetry); he suggests that we place poems where we will see them each day—on the back door or the computer screen saver—he reminds us to revel in the sounds of poems as well as their meanings, and to remember that, as one teacher joked, “a poem a day can keep burnout at bay.” In “Poetry in Service of Reaching Out,” Intrator suggests that poems can be used in teachers’ meetings, or as gifts to those who work beside teachers; in “Poetry in Service of Social Change,” Intrator suggests that poems can be used to provoke students toward new ways of thinking, to help students move quickly into “edgy” and deep conversations, to create a sense of commonality among the people in the room, and, finally, to preserve the fire in each teachers’ heart.
I am very glad to be able to read and reread all of the poems in this book, and I appreciate the thoughtful introduction by Parker Palmer and Tom Vander Ark, but most valuable for me are the words of the teachers who sent in the poems. Some of those who write about their favorite poems in this book are educators I have long admired from afar, like Joe Nathan, Ted Sizer, and William Ayers, some are people whose names I’ve never heard before. The surprising, thoughtful, story each teacher tells to introduce each poem bespeaks the pride of the profession, and will make readers wonder what story they would tell, which poem they would send in, if asked. This book is inspirational in the best sense. Go get a copy. Keep it on your night table. Read it, and then read it again.
Pages: 256
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 0-7879-6970-2
Reviewed by Cynthia Miller Coffel, University of Iowa
