An Open Letter to the Students of WBS
Elaine Yang
Majors: Neuroscience and Medicine, Science, and the Humanities
Minor: Writing Seminars
I am no award-winning poet, no bestselling novelist. I am not the teacher you fear, nor am I the teacher whom you visit to spill tea. I am not the teacher whose instructions you always follow. I am not even one of the teachers whose name you can remember (but don’t worry — it’s an honor to be mistaken for Arantza or Sophia from time to time!).
So, who am I to call myself a creative writing teacher?
I am one of the teachers you draw in your notebook. I am one of the teachers you greet by dancing. I am one of the teachers you write letters to.
Teaching with WBS has been a true privilege. Each of my twelve fifth graders at Furman L. Templeton Preparatory Academy inspires me endlessly. You probably don’t know yet how you’ve matured over the course of writing club, but I hope you think back on it one day and realize it was worth going to school for.
As I said before, you don’t do what I ask you to, and you aren’t shy about showing this fact off to me. Need an adjective to describe a memory? Here, take a story about meeting aliens at the Florida airport.
You show me words that make me pause, take in air, turn back to the world with a fresh perspective. You are young and wise.
When you ask if what you have written counts as a poem, I design and teach you a lesson about what makes a poem. All this, just to tell you: YES! You are a poet.
One day, perhaps you will level up from a rapping elementary schooler to a poetic beast of a high schooler reveling in the WBS major league.
You’ll come to my class in Gilman Hall at Johns Hopkins University, even on days you’re off from school. You’ll grapple with poems you don’t think you understand, poems you decide you don’t like — breathing meaning into these collections of words and into our lives. You’ll share your words, your thoughts, the subterranean depths of your feelings with me, with strangers, with the world.
You’ll be the reason I get excited for Mondays, you’ll help me find joy in school, you’ll teach me about poetry. And one day, maybe you will return to elementary school with me. I can hear it now, do you? There, pencils tapping on desks; here, chairs scraping on floors. Over all these sounds, I hear you telling the students that you are their writing club teacher.