Thou Shall Not Bore Thy Teacher: Paula’s Story

“Thou shall not bore thy teacher. It’s Dr. Bellah’s first law of essay writing.”

These words, spoken to my Thursday morning class, were met with a collective groan, one which said “But you don’t understand, Dr. B.; I’m a boring person, and I live in a boring town with other boring people.”

I told them they had confused the exotic with the creative, that creativity is the ability to discover the unusual in the usual, the extraordinary in the ordinary. Then, I shared Paula’s story.

Years ago my student wrote her descriptive essay over an oak tree that grew in her childhood backyard. It’s still my favorite piece in the genre.

In her first paragraph, Paula told of her excitement on discovering the tree when her family first moved to their new home. She was a tomboy and loved to climb. Her six-year-old self would sit in the tree and look out over her kingdom, which consisted of her cat and dog. She wondered, “can cats talk to dogs, or do cats just talk cat-talk and dogs, dog-talk. Maybe my cat is bilingual.”

In the next paragraph, she sat in her tree after arriving home from middle school. “Does Johnny like me,” she mused. “Oh, I hope so. But if he does Glenda’s going to be mad because she likes Johnny, but Johnny’s not for her. Ted, Ted likes Glenda. Of course, that’s going to upset Susie and then . . . .

In the third paragraph, Paula was a senior in high school, and she climbed her tree at night (it’s not cool for a high school woman to be seen in trees). Besides, she had just had a fight with her parents who had to be the worst parents in Texas.

“A 10:30 curfew on weeknights? Seriously? In a month I’ll be 18, old enough to die for my country. And I have to be home at 10*#!30? It’s child abuse; that’s what it is.” Then she climbed higher looking to the faraway lights of the city. “One day, I’ll live a long way from here. Maybe in Chicago. With him, the handsome boy I’ll marry.”

In her conclusion, Paula was her present self, a 30-something mother of preschoolers in my 1301 class. She decided to drive to the old neighborhood and see if her leafy friend and confidante was still there.

And she sighed with relief as she turned the corner and spotted the familiar branches. A minivan was parked in the driveway. She whispered the words out loud: “Do they have a little girl? Does she climb my tree”?