Learning from Our Students

by Jean Prokott

The sophomores have spent December writing creative nonfiction, short vignettes that allow them to rummage around for the metaphors hiding in their lives. I’ve been teaching personal essay for the last decade, so I often predict the topics students will choose (failing a test, church mission trip, sports injury) and the symbols they will find (butterflies, water, clouds) and preemptively direct them away from those clichés. The best part is to tell them what not to write. They have to keep rummaging.

Every once in a while, a kid finds a perfect peach of a topic and writes about it in a way that unties me. I want to share with you the story of “nonnie” so you see what I mean.* ​

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​nonnie
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When I found nonnie she was lying on her side, her stomach bloated, legs straight out, stiff, eyes wide open. The flies had already found her; they swarmed around her mouth, entered and exited as they pleased. She never let anyone as close as I was to her, she should have been running, putting a comfortable distance between us, keeping an eye on me as I fed the other cows. Yet there at my feet she lay motionless, off guard, vulnerable. Her fur coat fluffy, white and grey splotches with black running through like ink in water. Swirling, twisting, winding its way down her back and along her sides, creating an elegant contrast. This beautiful creature one foot away who should be running but is still as a rock. This beautiful creature with fluid creeping out of her mouth forming a puddle at my feet. The same fluid that built up in her lungs and drowned her, all because she faced an incline and couldn't get up. Such a simple action. There were visible imprints on the ground like a marred snow angel, made while she fought for life.
 
nonnie wasn't a tame cow, never one to crowd for food. She found out how to get under a fence in the far paddock and went for a couple joy runs. She ate grass in the pasture. She liked potatoes. I watched her birth, the first time I had ever seen a cow born. 3 days late, quick labor, the placenta covered her nose and I helped cut it away. Her mom tiredly cleaned her. She nursed the first milk, the most important for the calf, the colostrum containing antibodies necessary for immunity.  I remembered those things as I looked at her lifeless body. I saw this cow as a fresh little calf and I now see her as a bloated, lifeless, mound.
  
When Bill got there he told me what happened to nonnie. He got the skid loader and moved her to a grove of trees far from the house. I asked if he buried her, he said the coyotes would find her.​

That comma splice in the last line alone.

That structure with time, to start and end with death, to bring nonnie to life in the middle.

Her metaphor is one we all know. There's a defining moment in our lives when we learn about death. nonnie represents the literal of this coming-of-age, but also her struggle up the hill represents how my student felt when she lost nonnie.

Related read: On the Joy of Discomfort

It was a gift to read this piece. I wrote tomes of feedback in purple pen—mostly stars and wut and this is powerful over and over to the point where she probably thought I’d been living as a recluse for the last decade with only episodes of trash TV to keep me company. (Although to be fair, I think I just described last year and most of this one.)

One would have to be a callous car crash of a person if they didn’t feel their heart explode when they learned about nonnie’s fate and the effect she'd had on my student, and the day I read this, the time of year I read this, that this had been the 80th out of 95 essays I’d read—nonnie’s story was literally the saddest thing I’d ever heard in my whole sad life and I would spend the rest of my days mourning nonnie and my student’s loss.
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After I read about nonnie, I had a flashback to an experience I’d had on my grandparents’ dairy farm and a cow named Flopsy, who’d been born with a messed-up leg. The end of that story is predictable: while eating hamburgers one evening, my father brought it up.

​​​That wasn’t the impetus of my response, however.

I sent a few lines of the essay to a few teacher friends with the note:

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​And they wrote back: 

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Because it is quite clear we are all nonnie. 

Related read: Our Stories are Data, Too

Her tragedy was that she’d wanted to climb a hill. There are so many hills this year. nonnie drowned “all because she faced an incline and couldn't get up. Such a simple action.” nonnie had spent her life free and sassy and getting under fences. She “liked potatoes.”  I like potatoes, too, I’d thought. I like potatoes, too.
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Since the assignment was not one short scene, but three, when I conferenced with my student this week, I reviewed more rough drafts. One was about a horse named Iago (and I’m sorry, but find a more perfect name for a horse). An excerpt:

He broke through the fence the first day we had him […] Iago became my favorite horse. First I was brushing him, that soon turned into riding him, performing tricks like standing on him, spending hours in the barnyard making different ¨5 star meals¨ out of oats, potatoes, and grass (sushi was the favorite).

Is Iago still alive? I asked. Yes, Ms. Prokott, Iago is still alive.
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The third scene was about a chicken.

the chicken I refuse to name

​Just two weeks after we got the chicks they had doubled in size. Besse chickens, white, fat, feathers missing, they were meat birds. As chicks they were cute but the chick phase quickly disappeared, lasting only two weeks. This type of chicken is bred to grow fast as most meat birds are. It's easier that way, the stressed heart, weak legs, achy joints, and poor quality of life are a small setback. So small in fact that it gets skipped over, we don't care about the living chicken, we care about the meat. The fact that it grows fast and is ready to butcher in about a month and a half outweighs the chicken's life experience.
 
The chicken I refuse to name was probably three weeks old, it was in a really ugly period where the feathers were patchy, bare pink skin showed through, like a red stain on white. The chicken's feathers were dusty, making her look cream. She was probably two pounds, not fully grown but not a chick. I found her laying down in the chick coop, her breath irregular, heavy, all the energy she had quickly depleted as she tried to prolong her life. Slow, sickly, inhale, shaky, lacking, exhale. Her eyes tired, head heavy, dropped like a weight to the hard ground. She was suffering. I brought over a bowl of water and a small handful of food, like that was going to help. She didn't even seem to notice me, eyes lazily fixed ahead of her, hanging on to all the energy she had left. When she didn't eat or drink I sat there for a while, I knew what was going to happen next. Though it was selfish I wasn't ready for her to die, maybe she would get better. As I sat there though, I knew I was kidding myself, she wasn't going to get any better. I looked at her one last time, in all her frailty and weakness. Then I told Bill.
 
As he walked toward the chickens I walked slowly the other way. I came back to the chickens, shovel in hand, gloves on. With a hole, about a foot deep, dug under the cover of a large maple, I picked up her small, delicate, body and buried her.

I read this, I looked up, I said: Why are you doing this? Why are you trying to kill me?

Related read: Creating Space for Student Empowerment

What also kills me is how humble she is. I think I might spend the rest of the year convincing her that, yes, it is that good. I know I will spend the next decade using her essay as a model for the assignment. And I just now realize this random IKEA print of a cow I have hanging in my classroom will never look the same.

My reaction to this powerful piece was not only reader-response, of course—this student has mastered empathy and control of language and voice and happy accidents and every possible technique to make me react the way I did. But I don’t want to talk about how she got there, don’t care to list which activities we did in the classroom, don’t want to get my nails dirty in pedagogy. This was all her. I simply want to share this victory. Her victory to write such a heart wrenching piece, to have the maturity to revisit grief and make it beautiful.

While we’re all nonnies this year, struggling up the hill (and praying we don’t meet her fate) maybe we can also be my student. It’s been a year of loss, so let’s talk about it. Maybe find the metaphors. Learn from our students. 
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And the next time you have a glass of milk, please pour one out for nonnie.

​* The student has given me permission to share. 

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​Jean Prokott is an English teacher in the Rochester Public Schools. She is also the author of the book The Second Longest Day of the Year which won the Howling Bird Press Book Prize, author of the chapbook The Birthday Effect, a recipient of the AWP Intro Journals Award, and has both poetry and nonfiction published in numerous journals.  Learn more about Prokott online or connect via ​email.

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