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leading her friend farther down the hall, away from me, and away from my classroom door.
    Nita looked my way while she listened to Allie’s whisper, then turned back and continued the whispered conversation.
    Conspirators. I heard my mind declare this and realized I had been contaminated by Jar. Would I have even noted the ordinary scene of two girls sharing secrets if I hadn’t had the encounter with him?
    For better or for worse, a school is too filled with ongoing life to allow much brooding or pondering. The bell is always about to ring and present you with a new mass of personalities and issues, not to mention learning material, to deal with. You have no choice but to move on.
    So even if I wanted to figure out what was going on with Nita and Allie or their classmates in Juan Reyes’s class, there was no time to do so. A few minutes were given over to the clerical duties of homeroom, followed quickly by my first period class, my juniors, and, as Harriet would have it, their “TV show.”
    This class had a spark and enthusiasm for almost anything, most recently poetry, which I need not say isn’t always a guaranteed hit.
    Today, they were almost visibly thrumming with excitement.
    Big-time closed-circuit TV.
    GILLIAN ROBERTS
    26
    We’d been dipping into various genres, and I tried to find works that had an element with which they could identify. I try to do this when possible, and, since that’s what makes great literature great, it’s always possible. With poetry, it’s easy to find works that touch on the universal emotions—love, death, grief, and joy. As a plus, poems are short, and brevity is the prime consideration with many of my students.
    I also try to correlate—when it makes sense—the history, times, and social problems reflected in the prose and poetry we read. Sometimes it works and they discover the idea that fiction and poetry might be relevant to the larger world.
    It doesn’t always work. There are whiny questions about why we have to talk about Puritans when we read The Scarlet Letter.
    Didn’t that stuff belong in history class? They wanted everything kept circumscribed and too often behaved as if it were rude of me to snatch ideas from another discipline and try to show the connections.
    But so far, this class was open for whatever I suggested. If there were a pageant for high school sections, they’d win the Miss Congeniality prize. They’d shown enthusiasm for Whit-man, and still more for Ginsberg’s “Howl” and for Dylan’s lyrics, and had responded emotionally when we read World War I poems by Siegfried Sassoon, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and with actual gasps at the opening lines of Wilfred Owens’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”
    They were excited that poetry was not always their stereotypical image of a man skipping in a field of daisies and rhapsodiz-ing about it, but that it could be powerful, funny, or revelatory. It could be whatever the poet’s talents allowed.
    And then, a series of students separately confessed to me that they, too, found expression and solace by writing poems and, to my absolute amazement, they were willing to go public with their creations.
    That was a fine teaching day as far as my professional ego was 27
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    concerned, because I felt I’d created a safe enough atmosphere for them to be willing to express themselves—even adolescent boys, which made it something akin to a miracle.
    Last week, the day of the false alarm, about a dozen had read their work to their classmates, and it was such an unanticipated treat that the class suggested we bring the “show,” as they called it, to the school at large.
    Going public with some of the goopy June-moon-swoon cute-puppy verses was beside the point. Their words were as close to their honest emotions as they could get—or, perhaps, afford to get—at this age and in public, and I wanted to encourage them, to endorse verbal creativity