"Do It Yourself" - a Poem

When I heard rumors that my students were going online for summaries and faking their way through To Kill a Mockingbird, I wrote this poem and shared it with the classes. They got very quiet.

"Do It Yourself"
What are you here to learn?

When you do your own writing,

You learn who you are

And what you stand for

And what you stand against

And what you love

And what you makes you feel alive.



When you have someone or something write for you,

You learn to lie.

You learn to cheat.

And you lose all its benefits.

(See above.)



When you do your own reading,

You drink in ideas, experiences, characters, stories.

You feel them down to the roots of your hair,

And in the goosebumps you get

When the words are magic.

You inhale the sounds and

Patterns and

Qualities of great writing

To emulate in your own writing.

You are molded as a person by what you read

By what moves you

And by what you refuse to be moved by.

Reading gives you life experiences

That can’t be had in real life

And life lessons without the pain

Of living them.

Reading deepens you,

Teaches you how to be a better human.

But when you only pretend to read,

When you read the summaries

And jot down pretend-notes,

All you learn is to cheat.

You lose all the benefits of reading.

(See above.)



I listen as you sit discussing

What you were supposed to have read

And wonder how much of your talk is real

And how much of it is just so much

Excrement.

You go through the motions

But none of it means anything.

All you are learning is how to fling B.S.

Back and forth.



When you view learning as transactional,

You turn in counterfeit product

To get a grade

To get a credential someday

To get on to the next thing,

It may seem like a bargain

To get something for nothing.

All the result, none of the effort.



But in the end,

You get a hollow reward.

You become, by counterfeiting,

A counterfeit person.

A fraud.

A liar.

A cheat.

A surface person.

All show, no substance.

A Sedgewick Bell.



Education has made it all transactional

When maybe it should be transformational.

It isn’t really supposed to be about

Points and grades and GPAs.

Learning isn’t just ticking off the boxes.

Learning should deepen you,

Take you outside your comfort zone,

Make you more human.

More yourself.



Anyone can cheat.



Only you can write your words.

Only you can meet an author

On the pages

And have an interaction

Between just you two.

No one else can do it.

If you don’t do it,

No one else in the entire universe

Can have that interaction.

It will never exist.



When you cheat,

When you cynically think it doesn’t matter,

You are murdering the learning

That might have transformed you

And the person you might have become

Will never exist.