Literacy Narrative

“Here’s what I’d write about,” I tell my students, “if you were to give me this assignment.”

It was February, 1994. Kurt Cobain was still alive, we were hearing whispers here and there of something called the information superhighway, and in Lillehammer, Norway, the Winter Olympics had just begun. One drizzly morning, Ms. Hampton, my sixth-grade social studies teacher, freshly inspired by the athletic achievements she’d seen on TV the night before, handed out sheets of that lined, yellow paper usually reserved for math problems, and told us to write poems in praise of the Games.

She must’ve been a heavy smoker, Ms. Hampton. In her mid-forties, she coughed a lot and spoke in a husky contralto. The jeans she wore on Fridays were too tight for her postpartum frame. Cataracts of frizzy, blonde hair bounced off her shoulders whenever someone would upset her, which happened often enough. But she could also be lighthearted in her approach, as she’d be a few months later when explaining the Rwandan genocide to us. I remember her laughter and levity as she told us about all the mass deaths, the childish pleasure she took in pronouncing the words Hutu and Tutsi. To hear her say them, you’d have thought they were board games, or nicknames, or a couple new flavors of Starburst.

They might as well have been. We were so young — I had yet to turn twelve — and Rwanda was so far away. So was Norway, for that matter, but the Games captured our attention in ways the carnage in Africa…