This page includes links to other blogs I’ve written, about the tremendous luck of teaching at Touchstone, a rich, demanding, deeply satisfying day job. At the bottom of this page, I reflect on the ways that unusual experience of teaching has affected my poetry and my poetry life.
A Year to Think It Over
I wrote this blog after retiring, to sort out and share what I had learned from my years teaching young adolescents in an extraordianry learning community.
One thread of the blog thinks about reading and writing, with suggestions for some basic formats for helping students become more confident and more successful as readers and writers–many of those usable by older writers at any stage in their journey.
Other threads, linked in the navigation choices for the blog, explore ideas and ways of looking at the world which have become recurrent preoccupations of my poetry.
Teaching at Touchstone
The posts on this blog, written while I was still teaching, were originally published on the school website, to help parents understand what we were up to. Here, too, there are perspectives on reading and writing that apply to learners of any age; and, again, every post is informed by the school’s concern with supporting both individual students in all their diversity and vividness, as well as every level of community within the school’s population, in all our work and joy.
Teaching at Touchstone & My Own Poetry
Only a few of my poems focus directly on my experiences as a teacher. But I would be a very different poet without the experiences I shared with my students and with my colleagues.
I think of how our quick writing exercises were like a Quaker meeting for writing, as we supported each other with a deep, rich silence. (The first versions of some of my own poems were actually drafted during those quick exercises, within that empowerment we somehow all gave to each other.)
I remember vividly some breakthroughs for individuals. Kids so afraid of their own words that they could barely write, but finding a way. Or the child with a serious illness who used writing to help her come to terms with her fears and inevitable loneliness. Or the time the Head of the school asked me to lead my colleagues in a writing exercise focused on a student who had died after being hit by a car, many of us writing with tears streaming down our faces.
I think of the power of stories and storytelling in bringing to life and enriching all kinds of learning, and the joy of watching that happen for students from 4 to 14. Watching that power come alive.
Day by day, with all my colleagues and all our students, I experienced reading and writing as magical powers, powers practiced and used both deeply independently and also profoundly side-by-side.
Amazingly, in this world that can seem so hostile to those ideas and experiences, Touchstone Community School still exists, and is still an extraordinary learning environment. You can go learn about what they’re up to now, at https://www.touchstoneschool.com/
You may feel a little more hopeful about the world if you spend some time there.
Polly Brown / Poet 