Words are powerful. They enter our dark, ignorant places and light them.
I have been a teacher, private mentor and literacy coach, working in schools and libraries in NYC, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, for almost twenty years. A few years ago I implemented a poetry program I’d created in a high school in South Central, Los Angeles.
We reviewed many poems including the Langston Hughes poem, "Expendable," which prompted a discussion of the Iraq war. We talked about Walt Whitman's "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes" --- and I asked them --- "are you more than the face you present to the world?" We discussed Zora Neale Hurston's "Ya gotta go there ta know there"---and I asked them--- "where have you been?"
One day, a boy named Victor, turned in a piece of loose-leaf paper that said:
I’m sad
I’m thinking things that hurt my feelings.
I want to be someone else better than me
I want to change everything I see around me.
I’m feeling lonely.
I’m feeling that something beautiful is going to happen.
And I wondered, would something beautiful happen for Victor?
Would he graduate from a school with a 75% drop out rate? Would he go to college when less than 50% of graduates from his school did? Would he survive the violence of his streets where gang bangs and drug deals were constant?
I wanted to show Victor a world he’d never seen, to take him under my wing and "save him," so I left him the gift that had saved my life... love of books.
Like Victor, I was a latch key kid from a broken home. For years, I sat on a wall outside of Tiny Tots Toy Store, overlooking the cars on Route 22, waiting for my life to begin. While I waited, I read.
In books, (different than movies and TV where you watch other people) the heroes you meet inevitably begin looking like you do. The adventures, trials, explorations they face, YOU face. As they grow, YOU grow. It is a powerful transference. Reading raises standardized test scores BUT MORE THAN THAT it raises confidence, compassion, optimism, and belief in oneself!
In Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," he says: "Camerado, I give you my hand..."
And I took it. It led me off of a wall on Route 22, New Jersey into countless, untold vistas.
As educators, we cannot possibly reach every student that needs us. We can impart in them a desire, thirst, demand for knowledge any way they can get it. It has been created for them. And it is waiting.
It will not come to them. They have to reach for it.
We have to give them the desire to extend their hand!
Diane Luby Lane
Founder, Executive Director Get Lit-Words Ignite
The Get Lit Players prepare to take Chicago by storm at the Brave New Voices poetry slam next week by showcasing some of the pieces they will be performing at a fundraiser yesterday evening.
