“Kept In,” oil on canvas, by Erskine Nicol, 1870.
In my classroom I’ve hung a Banksy painting.
The one where a mohawked teen wields the
Anarchist flag while his mother straightens his bandanna,
tells him “don’t forget to eat your lunch and cause a little trouble.”
It hangs a few inches below the American flag,
and every second period a room full of teenagers pledge allegiance
in its direction with their hands over their hearts.
It’s an act of discreet rebellion, a coded message, my promise to arm them
in whatever way I can to move through a world designed to keep them in line,
conforming to a status quo established long before they were born.
On the first day of class I write a question on the board,
“Who are you really?” then tell them “use your words.”
Tell me what I need to know about you.
We read “Theme for English B” as an exemplar,
Langston Hughes’ literary middle finger to a former teacher,
to America, to anyone trying to tell him who he was supposed to be.
In response, a boy writes “I don’t want to be here” sixty six and a half times,
just enough to fill a whole page, hands it back to me with a smirk on his face.
I pass it back a day later with an “A” at the top and a, “thank you for your honesty.”
He and I never talk about that assignment again, but the next week
he turns in an articulate analysis of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” and at the end of class
I tell him he looks good, ask if he’s been getting a lot more sun.
He gets much more comfortable asking the hard questions,
the complex ones that start with provided stems like “what did the author intend when,”
and mundane ones like “why are we doing this, what’s the point?”
I answer them all with a smile on my face, and I can tell it irritates him a little.
There’s a part of him that needs to get under my skin, so to satiate his appetite,
I feed it more literature, leave a banned book list on his desk like it’s a menu.
He digs in, swallows words of wisdom mouthful by mouthful, devours pages of
The Catcher and the Rye and The Call of the Wild like he’s a hungry ghost,
until there’s no more room inside him for all those syllables, so he leaks literature.
Ten cent words slip from his lips, bleed into the back pages of every notebook.
Find their way into every daily journal, and he never once tells anyone I put them there.
Because the truth is. I didn’t. I just knocked at the door, brushed leaves off a forgotten path,
got out of his way and let him loose into the world, to wreak exactly the kind of havoc it takes to
change it for the better.
Chris Atkin is an English teacher and poet from Orem, UT. A two time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work can be found in The Lascaux Review, Last Leaves Magazine, and The Rising Phoenix Review.
