The Paper Dart
An ode to creativity and distraction

Why I’m Here.

“We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I’d burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help.”

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Last week, I started to feel a little crazy. I have been self-isolating with my family for a long time and, as the weeks have turned into months, I find myself spending more hours of more evenings lost on the internet. I know I am not alone in the fact that I have always used social media as an escape – a way to check out from my messy reality and “recharge.” I have also, at times, used it as a substitute for real social connection. During times in my life when real community was lacking – my first years in new cities, and my first months as a new mom to name a few – I have found myself turning to my phone to fill the empty spaces. The current state of the world hasn’t made things any easier, and I know that many of us have been clinging to technology even more obsessively in a desperate attempt to ease the loneliness.

My son Max and our shared love: my phone.

About a week ago, I found myself starting to become so preoccupied with content I was following online that I felt distracted and out of focus in the truly important parts of my day. When I complained to my husband about how I was feeling, and the compounding guilt I felt about feeling these feelings, he laughed at me. In the way, of course, that only someone who is lovingly aware of your self-destructive behavior patterns can. 

“You’re living through a pandemic,” he said. “You’re lonely and probably a little depressed. You should put your phone down and read a book.”

Sounds easy enough, right? And some nights it is. But other nights, I still find myself so caught up in the things I know are bringing me down. Like Instagram. I have deleted and re-added this app to my phone about 129497394 times since quarantine began. 

I’m not going to hate on Instagram entirely, despite the fact that I am definitely going to delete it from my phone again at some point this week. Instagram, and the internet in general, has been positive for me in a lot of ways: it allowed me to reconnect with childhood friends, and find support and community when I was dealing with infertility. Yet, while I am SO grateful for many of the people I have connected with online, I also find myself struggling to balance the good with the toxic. More often than not, I turn to Instagram, not for real connection, but to be voyeuristic, and feel the thrill of “spying” on people who have purposely thrown open the curtains of their lives for me. I search for things that are pretty, or low-stakes. A cute summer dress, for example, that might distract me from the looming sense of dread concerning the state of mine and my children’s futures that is often lying in wait at the back of my brain. When I turn off my phone at the end of the night, I’m usually in a pretty weird place. My brain feels elated, but I certainly don’t. 

Books, on the other hand, are kind of messy. When my husband suggested that I pick the book I was reading back up, I reminded him that I was reading Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, and that it probably wouldn’t make me feel any less depressed. But then again, that’s probably part of the point.

Unlike mindless scrolling, books don’t always make me happy. Sometimes they actually make me super sad. But, they do push me to put my problems into perspective. They take me out of my own head, and into someone else’s. Books remind me that it is possible to really know someone, even when they are always changing. Writers who understand humanity so completely that they are able to create characters out of thin air give me so much faith in our ability to really see and be seen by others, even when the people we are painting for each other aren’t real. 

In the world of Fahrenheit 451, everyone has turned away from books. People defame authors as confusing and contradictory and seemingly pointless. A lot of people (myself included) have drawn frightening parallels between our world and that of Bradbury’s novel, claiming that the next generation is so lost in their phones that we’ll never find them. 

However, I don’t think you have to be a literary scholar to benefit from book therapy. I think the teens (and adults, because, let’s keep it real) can keep learning TikToks and worshiping confounding YouTube celebrities, and still keep one foot rooted on the ground. I, myself, can keep hunting for the perfect floppy hat to help me achieve the ever so elusive Anne of Green Gables-Lauren Conrad vibe I’ve been going for, while also putting down my phone at 8 to read Dracula before bed. Everyone’s attention is being pulled in a million directions, and I think asking for all of it or, honestly, even most of it, is unrealistic. 

In addition to being a phone addict and an over-thinker, I’m also a middle school teacher. When I read with my class, most kids only connect with a small portion of the book. It could be a chapter or a page, or, more often than not, a single line. A lot of it, they can’t understand because they aren’t ready yet. After I read a book, I definitely don’t remember most of what happened either. Usually, what sticks with me is a line or two, maybe a page or a chapter. There have been times when I forgot most of a book’s plot, but was truly shaken by a single word. I have read such small pieces of text that have opened my eyes to errors in my judgment, or pointed me in the right direction. Quotes that have helped me better understand myself, someone I love, or someone I don’t. Paragraphs that pointed out my ignorance, or highlighted how I actually might know more than I thought I did. 

So I guess my goal for this blog is two-fold. I need a reason to write, because it makes me feel full and it keeps the worry at bay. And I want to share pieces of what makes teaching English so special to me–those small paragraphs, sentences, and phrases that snap us out of our own heads and ground us in reality. 

In January of this year, not long before I had to shutter the doors of my physical classroom, I was reading the above quote to my class. One of my students, who had been flicking paper-airplane darts into the ceiling for the prior 20 minutes suddenly stopped and looked at me. “Woah,” he shouted, without raising his hand. Several kids laughed, and I’m pretty sure I did as well. But I really hope that everyone in the room saw what was happening. That this student was experiencing, maybe for the first time, that feeling of being 12, or 32, or 90, and someone you’ve never met, who seems so insurmountably far away from you, saying something about a fictional character, in a fictional world, that so perfectly resonates with the very real present you find yourself in.

The Paper Dart

The new trend in classroom disruption for the 2019-2020 school year (besides coughing in a classmate’s face and whispering “Coronavirus” under your breath) was the paper dart. While a paper dart may look deceptively like its more innocuous cousin, the paper airplane, don’t be fooled. Paper airplanes are what we children of the 90s used to pass notes to one another in class. We threw them in the halls in hopes of “accidentally” hitting our crushes in the back of the head. I’ve allowed students in my own classroom to fold rough drafts of their essays into paper airplanes and send them around the room in search of anonymous feedback. The paper dart, however, is a modern feat of engineering with a singular, epic purpose.

After meticulously folding school-issue post-its into the sharpest possible point, the creator of the paper dart will wait for the perfect moment. When my back is turned and he or she has the undivided attention of a few other classmates, the dart is carefully balanced between two thumbs and flicked ferociously into the air. The moment of truth arrives when the dart either bounces off of the ceiling or, miraculously, hits its mark. If successful, the dart lodges its tip into the cork ceiling and thenceforth becomes a monument to be idolized by all for minutes to come. Until I start a slow clap, and knock it down with a yardstick. 

The paper dart trend was annoying at first. After all, I work at a public school, and those cork ceiling panels don’t just grow on trees. But I also found it kind of entertaining, and my lackluster admonishment seemed to serve as encouragement for the most enthusiastic participants.

A Paper Dart

As the weeks wore on, I watched kids’ eyes light up when they entered the room and saw an array of darts on the ceiling. Students were neglecting their nightly video games and Facetiming each other as they made Tupperware containers full of paper darts. One of my students, who had previously admitted to me that English had always been his least favorite subject, came to my class every day with a smile on his face, excited to talk “darting” technique.   

Last week, I went back to my classroom for the first time in two months to clean out my desk, organize student work, and prepare my classroom for the most uncertain of summer breaks. As I was wiping down the whiteboard, I looked up to see a small bunch of neon green paper darts still stuck to a ceiling panel. I laughed to myself, and then choked on the months worth of dust floating in the air.

While I hope that the students who left my class in March remember how to write a paragraph, and what a compound sentence is, and why blindness in literature is actually a gift, I also hope they also remember the absolute thrill of letting a paper dart loose in the air and waiting, breath held, to see where it hits.

What My Kids Are Reading 5/22/2020

Margot: 3 Years 

Roxaboxen By Alice McLerran

The elementary school I attended as a kid backed up to a small forest preserve. The fields and playground equipment, on which we were allowed to play during recess and lunch, were bordered by what we used to call a hill, but which I would now describe as a snaking mound of dirt. Beyond the mound were the trees and swampy wetlands of the “forest” we were only allowed to enter on special occasions, like when we lived like pioneers for a week in the third grade. 

Many of my clearest childhood memories–ones that I know weren’t falsified by photographs or my parents recollections–took place on this mound of dirt. Every recess, all of the kids in my class would take up shop at one of the trees, stumps or bushes on “the hill.” We spent hours harvesting leaves, berries and sticks, mining for rock money and selling our homemade “jams” and “pies” to one another. 

I distinctly remember that a girl named Emmy was the boss of the village. She always set up shop in the best tree–one whose branches hung low to the ground and created a kind of natural tee-pee–and sometimes dictated which other business were allowed to operate and where. We all respected, admired, and oftentimes talked smack about Emmy. I look back on her now, fondly, as something of a first boss. 

Rediscovering Roxaboxen has been like rediscovering a piece of my childhood. The story follows a group of kids who spend their summers joyfully pretending to be adults. They build houses, self-organize and solve conflicts. They remind us how simple the game of life could really be, if we just stopped taking it so seriously. At the end of the book, one of the children, now grown, comes back to Roxaboxen, and her serendipitous rediscovery of a rock she once used as “currency” is such a sweet reminder that growing up doesn’t have to mean letting go.  

Max: 14 Months 

Brown Bear, Brown Bear (Slide and Find Edition) – By Eric Carle 

This has been both of my kids’ “first book.” I have, obviously, shown Max books prior to this one, but Brown Bear, Brown Bear was the first book he didn’t try to eat or throw at the dog. He is delighted by the pictures, and thrilled by the challenge of the little sliding doors. I’m also pretty sure he said “blue horse” the other day, which just about killed me. 

Where to next?