This morning I woke up and my 4 year old had a fever of 102.3, I knew I was going to stay home with him today. As I dropped off my other two sons I tuned into Morning Edition on my local NPR radio station. My day never seems to start off on the right foot unless I hear Garrison Keillor's smooth voice talking to me. This morning the poem he read seemed to follow along the same lines as a discussion we are having in one of my education classes.
We are discussing the next generation, or Generation Y. I fall into this category since I was born between 1978-2000, although just barely. I actually remember when the internet first came out. My mother worked at Novell back then, a precursor to Intel and other networking computer companies. Well, we are discussing this "new" generation and the implications it has on teaching these students. Is it more difficult, less difficult, how do we tailor our lesson plans around them? Then I heard this poem, The Future, and it made me pause. In looking for the future, we must first find the present and the past. In order to teach a student, I don't need to develop brand new techniques, I merely need to fine tune some of the methods I already know. In a time where we are constantly looking forward, this poems shows that we cannot do that without still holding on to the present and past.
The Future
On the afternoon talk shows of America
the guests have suffered life's sorrows
long enough. All they require now
is the opportunity for closure,
to put the whole thing behind them
and get on with their lives. That their lives,
in fact, are getting on with them even
as they announce their requirement
is written on the faces of the younger ones
wrinkling their brows, and the skin
of their elders collecting just under their
set chins. It's not easy to escape the past,
but who wouldn't want to live in a future
where the worst has already happened
and Americans can finally relax after daring
to demand a different way? For the rest of us,
the future, barring variations, turns out
to be not so different from the present
where we have always lived—the same
struggle of wishes and losses, and hope,
that old lieutenant, picking us up
every so often to dust us off and adjust
our helmets. Adjustment, for that matter,
may be the one lesson hope has to give,
serving us best when we begin to find
what we didn't know we wanted in what
the future brings. Nobody would have asked
for the ice storm that takes down trees
and knocks the power out, leaving nothing
but two buckets of snow melting
on the wood stove and candlelight so weak,
the old man sitting at the kitchen table
can hardly see to play cards. Yet how else
but by the old woman's laughter
when he mistakes a jack for a queen
would he look at her face in the half-light as if
for the first time while the kitchen around them
and the very cards he holds in his hands
disappear? In the deep moment of his looking
and her looking back, there is no future,
only right now, all, anyway, each one of us
has ever had, and all the two of them,
sitting together in the dark among the cracked
notes of the snow thawing beside them
on the stove, right now will ever need.
"The Future" by Wesley McNair, from Talking in the Dark. © David R. Godine, 1998.
