The Teacher Who Graded My Poem in Pencil So I Could Change It
Mrs. D'Souza never wrote in ink on anything that mattered.
Mrs. D'Souza graded everything in red ink except our poems.
Maths tests got red. Essays got red. The weekly diary we all hated got red. But the poems we slid under her door on Friday afternoons came back on Monday in pencil, a soft grey HB that looked like it had been sharpened with a kitchen knife.
I asked her about it once, in the corridor, when I was eleven and thought I had caught her in a mistake. She looked at me over the top of her glasses the way she did when you had said something worth answering.
'Ink is for things that are finished,' she said. 'A poem isn't finished until you stop writing it.'
I didn't understand then. I understand now, twenty years later, sitting at a desk with a red pen of my own.
She wrote in pencil because she knew we would want to change it. She was not grading; she was leaving the door open. The mark in pencil was not 'this is what you got'. It was 'this is what it could be if you keep going'.
I still have the first poem she ever pencilled. It is terrible. I was eleven and I wrote about a tree in the schoolyard and I used the word 'beauteous' because I thought it sounded old. She did not mark it down for that. She pencilled a small asterisk next to the line about the bark, and under it she wrote 'this is the real one'.
She was right. It was the only real line in the poem.
She died last spring. The school sent a mass email and there was a notice in the paper and I drove past the gate on the way home and thought about the pencil. I still write in pencil on my students' poems. I don't tell them why.
Some things you don't explain. You just hand them down.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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