Seventh Grade

There are occasions in teaching when a student walks in and you know just by looking at her that she's smarter than you--not just capable of one day acquiring the knowledge that you've spent thirty-some-odd years gathering, but that's she's surpassed it, and likely that she surpassed it in, say, seventh grade. Such was the case of Courtney Chatellier. Last fall, Starbucks in hand, she stepped into my classroom. You're Courtney, I said, and she wasn't even fazed by my psychic abilities. Anyway, Courtney just had two essays that she wrote in my class published in NYU's Mercer Street. My favorite of the essays is about how we're all in seventh grade, how we're all walking down the halls clutching our bathroom passes and staring into classrooms; we live every moment simultaneously, as Courtney puts it:

We are creation and destruction at once, we are change and mutation, we are the skin cells of our twelve-year old noses and the domino effect of all the particles in ourselves that we rattle around and knock together in all the restless fidgeting before class starts. Tense falls apart, lies limp on the page like a word you've repeated so many times it turns into unsignified gibberish. We are what we were and what we will be. You and I are in seventh grade on the day the world possibly ends, the same day it endures into infinity when all of our atoms, star-like, are nothing but the resonance of every body that ever existed.

In honor of Courtney, here's a picture of me in seventh grade:

Can't you hear the lockers banging shut? Can't you see Clint Eliot hiding behind the tree getting ready to dump me? Ah, but the pen...even then it saved me.