Uncertainty

In first period English we read a poem, from the August Regents Exam

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Our house is at the crest

of a mountain formed

by a fault line that’s still

doing its work. We’re up

over five thousand feet,

and probably, slowly, the spot

that we sit on is going

to get higher and higher.

So, at some point, the house

is coming down, shaken

to bits, I suppose, and what

we’re banking on is that

we’ve chosen the right moment

in geologic time, a sweet

spot between cataclysms.1

And that’s what Annie and I

hope for generally,

and what everyone seems

to want—some forgettable

moment between great wars

or typhoons or plagues—to have

timed it just right, so we’re

in just the right place between

what we read about in history

books and the moments after

which history won’t matter much.

—John Brantingham

from Earthshine, November 2007–December 2009

www.ruminations.us

Conan is worried about passing the exam.

He should be – I ask him what the poem is about

and he says something to do with plates.

So we read it many times. Conan is serious, he concentrates.

We talk about a lot. The exam says we should use the ideas from the poem to write a paragraph about uncertainty.

But Conan is confused. He writes that the poem is about a man who hopes his house does not fall down.

Which of course, it is, but unlike the campaign commercials that made me want to throw something at the tv (just how vulnerable are flat screens?-they probably don't break into the star-shaped shatter- so popular in the cartoons of my childhood,) the poems speaks to me more and more each time I read it It speaks to me.  I worry a lot..

And then Hurricane Sandy hits.

Neither Conan nor I suffer the terrible damage. The school community, so recently devastated by a automobile crash that killed four students, is spared the loss of life

But many have lost homes, and cars and the sense of well being.

On Monday when we return, I tell Conan I thought about him and the poem, during the week- at first he is not sure why, but Pablo  reminds him that a typhoon is like a hurricane.

Tuesday is Election Day.

Wednesday, a snowstorm only half as bad as the Hurricane hits. This time our home loses only half its electricity.

The Teacher's College Writer's project people, tell the story of the classroom and the first snow. The teacher invites the class to come to the window and observe the first flakes of the year. From the back, the cynic yells out, “Don't do it, she'll only make us write about it!”

We watch the snow and calculate how long the commute home will be. It's high school. We don't write about the first snow.

So it's not until the end of the week that I do make them read about the election.

We read Hope and Change Part 2 by Thomas Friedman.

We talk and talk about what it means.

I have been taking a lot of criticism in our small group professional learning community for suggesting that I use New York Times pieces with the student in the Resource Room. I am told over and over that the reading level is way too hard for them.

I am under no illusion that it isn't difficult reading with difficult vocabulary, but the material interests me and they are mad close to being fully grown adults, so I persist.

We slog or way through Friedman's analysis of what went wrong for the Republicans. And in the end Pablo says, “What if its just that Romnney had bad luck?”

Conan says elections don't have anything to do with luck. Obama was just the better choice.

Maybe.

Or maybe he was kind of lucky that Sandy hit and blew the campaign right off the front page of the paper and the nightly news.

Maybe.

Uncertainty.