Earlier this week, I sat down with my young cousin helping him study for a literature test. During that tedious process I came across some of my old favourite poems in high school and relived the other joys those classes brought. I sat. I read. I thought.
Oh how I loved literature class: voice acting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; performing excerpts of August Wilson’s Fences and other plays; learning about the cultures in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. It is funny how my class hated reading the complex and confusing old English but when it came to the plays we were quite the Shakespearian dramatists. As for other plays we were okay, I guess.
And poetry! Poetry was just as poetry should be: beautiful, expressive, contemplative. I had a knack for creole poems and I always loved reading through the Caribbean voices.
No doubt about it, I had a fantastic English teacher who went way beyond the curriculum. We enjoyed Google in classes, projector slideshows on topics, lesson plans, and CXC reports.
It was a lot of hard work, but we had a lot of resources and a fantastic way to grasp all we could as the countdown to final exams marched on. For sure, on that day of our English exams we were ready.
I sat at my desk at home for the rest of that night, reading my old poetry book, completely forgetting that I had a law paper to write.
I went to bed, woke up and came back to my desk to see my laptop staring at me. There was an open ‘Word’ page with nothing but “The Constitutive and Declarative Theories of the Recognition of States in International Law” on it. I had not even gone past the heading. Oh boy! Was I in trouble!
That empty page with the submission deadline just a few hours away kicked me back to today. But I still longed for those days. Oh the sweet and bitter nostalgia. Two years out of high school and I remember those classes as if they were yesterday. I wish they were today.
I wish they were today because those very same classes opened my eyes to a whole new world. Those classes made me love writing and drama and influenced me towards journalism and artistic expressions.
You see, some people love to draw, some love to dance and others to sing. I love to write. I love to imagine. I love to create.
I wish that the classes I once enjoyed others can too, so others – the younglings, especially can be just as inspired, be just as motivated and strive just as hard.
I wish that the education curriculum could be transformed today where we no longer sit and use blackboards, but we perform plays, we read in our Caribbean voices and embrace or unique arts and talents, we stand on our platforms and we speak our minds.
Oh sweet and bitter nostalgia! You really never miss the water until the well runs dry.
