There are a bunch of lines in Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Shoulders” that have stayed with me ever since I discovered it a few years ago.
Like many good poems, it takes something small and simple — a man is trying to cross the street in the rain while carrying his son — and turns it into something big and powerful.
You see the poem’s scope open beautifully in its third stanza.
This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.
To him, this boy is the most precious thing in the world. To everyone else, he is just a boy. The poem teaches us that the people that come and go in our lives rarely have marks; they don’t come with instructions for handling. Yet, we are all sensitive cargo. We all at times need to be shepherded through the traffic and the puddles to the other side.
The poem does a dance, zooming in then out, in then out. It turns the microcosm into a macrocosm. It is not just about a father and son crossing the street. It is about us all. We know this because the fifth stanza switches from the singular “he” of the father to the collective “we,” pulling us all in.
We’re not going to be ableto live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.
And those are the words that I keep coming back to again and again this year as I think about what we are doing with one another.
THE STORIES THAT SHEPHERD
In one video that I did for College Board this year, I talked about the power of a narrator. In it, I revealed that the person telling the story controls the story. Their power exists because they control what is said and how it is said.
So, who is telling the story of this year? What is that story?
There is a predatory narrative going around telling us that acrimony, divisiveness, and suspicion are tearing us apart. This story wants us to believe that our social, political, educational, and economic institutions have been knocked down by the wrecking balls of lost faith. Nothing is true anymore and everything is beyond repair. The center can no longer hold.
It is easy to fall into the trap of this narrative. The documentary, The Social Dilemma reveals the ways in which the big machines of news and culture use our fear of inadequacy — of ourselves and of the world around us — to keep us addicted to these platforms.
But that is just one story.
Teachers are rising to this moment to share a counter narrative. Carol Jago is tweeting the quotes and questions we need to ponder. Todd Finley’s Brain Blasts show us the wonderful layers we have to approach teaching. Joel Garza and Scott Bayer have invited us to discover new literature to enrich our own lives and our classroom. And the 8,400 members of the AP Lit Facebook community have built a space to share, applaud, and unite.
These, and so many others, have me shepherded through the traffic this year.
TEACHING AS SHEPHERDING
This moment is calling us as teachers.
We have to shepherd each other during these difficult times. As we all face the uncertainty, chaos and fatigue, we have to be each other’s keeper. We have to share the positive things going on in our classrooms to create a chorus blithe and strong.
But this just doesn’t apply to our fellow teachers.
Each day we log into Zoom or face students, the world’s most precious cargo is looking to us for shepherding. Perhaps the reason why Nye’s poem is entitled “Shoulders” is because mythology teaches us that shoulders can bear the weight of the world. And in taking one student to the other side of the road we each can be our own Atlas.
