I want to be a writer.

Therefore,

I write.

Sometimes.

I have just started a teacher observation program. I am to spend 30 hours in a classroom, watching, listening, talking notes; or so I thought. The moment I met my teacher I knew that it would be different. She graduated from college 4 years ago. She teaches high school Freshman (and loves it might I add). She told me,

"I want you to ask questions, lots of them."

I knew I would like her. I was also genuinely surprised when she told me to participate in class.

"I want you to walk around with the students and discuss this Robert Frost poem with them."

The poem was Mending Wall.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

-Robert Frost

My student of course did not understand it.

I could barely understand it.

I started walking around the classroom. I met first with two girls who looked at me like I was some kind of Greek goddess (I've been reading a lot of epic poetry lately so excuse me if I go off onto a extended simile). We talked for a few minutes and I moved on. The next group was larger, and much more confused.

"We have no idea," They said unanimously.

"Neither do I," I said.

The longer I talked with them, the better I understood it.

It is a beautiful poem, really. Robert Frost has a change of heart, I think. He starts out complaining about all the different elements that tear down his wall. He even gets his neighbor with him, and they start pacing down the property, "magically" trying to get the stones to stay in place. But then they come to a clearing where the wall disappears altogether. His neighbor seems to hint that he wished that there could be a wall there too, separating their apple trees and pine trees. 'Good walls make good neighbors' he says.

I though, just as Robert Frost must have done; doing so while completely surrounded by high school Freshmen; how would a wall build a relationship? I know that we have all heard of the saying,

"Build bridges not walls."

Well, why would his neighbor find it so necessary to build a wall to separate trees?

Wouldn't you tear down a wall in order to make a friend? Isn't that what its all about?

I'm with you Robert Frost.

I don't understand either.

And yet you were able to express that in a few short lines--unlike me.