What's in YOUR closet?

Yesterday was a little crazy, all of it--the whole day. At the end of it I couldn't find much I wanted to write about because most of what I would have written about seemed whiny and self-pitying, or included rants about health insurance claims, playground injustices, the weather, and kids who spill hot chocolate on your favorite green pants. Sometimes all these petty and not-so-petty things add up inside your head, like an overflowing storage bin, and you just want to break out the rubber gloves and a gigantic vacuum and do some major housecleaning before you truly lose your mind. It was fitting yesterday, then, that I did just that sort of mental housecleaning exercise with one of my writing classes. I was given this course to teach last week, two weeks into the semester, to make up for an upper-level course that was canceled at the last minute. I haven't taught this class--developmental writing--since 2004, and I went into it with a certain amount of foot dragging and complaining (New syllabus! New book! Change!). I think I was worried more because it's been so long since I taught it, and because I spent much of 2004 in a state of extreme sleep-deprivation. But two days into the course, I'm excited. I'm remembering how much I love working with students who need a little extra help; students who come to college packing big attitudes and even bigger self-esteem problems; students who just don't believe me when I tell them they can do it--this college thing--they really can. Here's the mental housecleaning writing prompt I gave them on Monday: Imagine you have the chance to clean out your mental closet--what would you pick to throw away, and why? We had fun discussing just what a mental closet is, but in the end all the students agreed that they had just the thing in their own heads--and I bet you do, too. Some admitted that they keep theirs fairly organized, with clearly labeled bins stacked one upon the other. Others realized that their closets are fairly cluttered, and in need of a cleaning. Some, we could all tell, walk through life with their shoulders against the closet door, straining from the effort of keeping that door closed against tragedy and anger and disappointment. When the time came to share their writing yesterday I was amazed, as I always am, by just how much a young person--these young people--carry with them every day. I heard tales that made my heart ache, and tales that made me smile. "What about you?" a student asked me at the end of class. "Me?" "Do YOU have a closet?" I didn't even have to think about that one for long. "Oh yes, I do," I told him. "It's big, with accordion doors, and really in need of a cleaning." "Maybe YOU should do the writing exercise," he told me. Maybe I should. How about you? What's in YOUR closet?
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