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Adam Jon

a place to store personal thoughts so everyone can read them. Twitter, you cannot contain me.

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    • Pride in teaching and in students

      I have always been proud of teachers. Since my beginnings in the career, and reflecting back on my time as a student, I hold teachers as professionals in their craft akin to lawyers or doctors or CEOs. I and my fellow teachers have one of the most important jobs to do in order to keep a community aware and functioning and to help grow individuals in ways they find relevant to their upcoming adult lives. It is an amazing task that I am proud to be a part of every day. 

      For five years, I have been focused on becoming the most professional, most effective teacher I could be. I arrive at school early, work through lunch, and stay late refining lessons, grading with meaningful feedback, and generally working to make my class periods and assignments as coherent as can be. I take great pride in my work ethic to better myself as a professional.

      Yet, it has taken me the better of five years to extend that pride into what my students do every day. As a teacher in high school, there will always be distractions to this emotion. Teenagers will always be deficient in ways that may frustrate teachers: they are distracted, they are ignorant, they deal with issues that pull their thoughts away from the tasks I expect them to complete and comprehend on a daily basis. But, this is a teacher’s duty–to reach out and teach these students despite of and in the face of these complications.

      Listen in on any teacher meeting and, in my experience, and these issues will be on the tongues of those present. Teachers, myself included, get hung up on what students can’t or won’t do, instead of first stating what they can do, what they are doing, and what we as teachers should be commending them for. 

      For example, as I was spending my lunch hour picking up the pieces of the morning lessons and adjusting plans for the next day, the editors of the school newspaper for which I am an adviser came in during their lunch hour to plan. This was a group of students willingly giving up their sacred lunch time to attend to something they took pride in. They worked, laughed, and analyzed as they sifted through the articles written so far for our latest edition. Notecards were written and moved about the planning bulletin board as they discussed what articles should be featured on the front paged and made notes to what articles have yet to be written in order to report back to the class. It was truly an amazing event in a school setting. 

      But at the time, I just sat behind my desk, oblivious to what was happening in my room. I graded. I brooded. I thought about tomorrow in the context of today’s mishaps. I trusted them to do a good job and paid them no mind.

      The editors finished their work, happy with what they had accomplished and it wasn’t until I got home, thought through two or three more pedagogical conundrums that had irked me throughout my day, made dinner, and put my infant daughter to bed that I reflected on this event: students who wanted to take ownership of a task were taking pride in their work. And this realization filled ME with pride, and a bit of humility that I couldn’t stop to recognize the greatness that was happening right in my own classroom just hours before. 

      Paramount to all the work teachers put in to make themselves an effective instructor and instrument of learning, teachers have to open their eyes to the positives students exhibit daily. We must take pride in the successes of our students and let them know that we value them and their work. It could be something as relevant and large as planning the school newspaper or as small as reading quietly for ten minutes. This type of feedback, immediate feedback, is just as important in my mind as knowing what questions students got wrong on a quiz or where a comma really goes in a sentence. 

      Pride is not a passive emotion. It’s closer to joy than happiness, but it’s a joy that is best when shared explicitly. People value being valued. I take pride in my students noticing I am a hard-working teacher. All students should know that I take pride in the things they do, however small those things may seem in the sea of hormones, distraction, and memes that is high school. 

    • A Hunting Story

      That one summer Saturday late-morning
      breakfast over and you hop
      into your father’s truck,

      not the company one
      but the shit one,
      the one before company money,
      the one that smelled like
      high school beer,
      self-changed oil,
      cigarettes of a time your father wasn’t your father.

      The hot breeze blows in from cracked windows
      and cracked floorboards
      and the steady hum
      reminds you of your cat
      but not the shit one
      that hisses when you go near the food bowl
      but the one that loves you
      and sleeps on your feet,
      lets you pet it too hard.

      That warm hum that seemed to permeate comfort and heat
      when your father took you hunting
      for the first time in the very truck,
      the shit one
      that my father drove
      when he wasn’t my father.

      In Montana, the most tender thing you can do
      is put a gun in the hands of someone you love.

      You left at unknown hours.

      You left for unknown weather.

      You left for unknown coulees –
      the things of childhood memories:
      Digging out that old, shit truck from a snow drift.

      My father laughed,
      dressed gruesomely in orange and red,
      sipped on a beer,
      checked his fingers for blood,
      checked my fingers for cold,

      stuffing cut spruce into the wheels rotating on
      snow turned ice underneath

      that truck, which now rots in some yard far from my father’s house,
      bones of a frame, eviscerated, used, appreciated,
      cherished but now gone,

      a sacrifice
      for me and my brother.

    • Conversation of a River

      Conversation of a River

      EPIGRAPH

      “Late Fragment,” by Raymond Carver

      And did you get what
      you wanted from this life, even so?
      I did.
      And what did you want?
      To call myself beloved, to feel myself
      beloved on the earth.

      He says:
      “When I die, I’ll still be reading this poem to you
      in this remembered moment,
      when my hands shake
      and my ears grow hair, stiff as summer wheat.

      So take this book, and let’s go down to the river.”

      The air is innocuous as a song
      falling on concentrated ears.

      Her reply:
      “I will go down to the river
      to rest my feet on the steady current
      to rest my frame in the shade of cottonwood.”

      And she does love these summer nights,
      more than others:
      cool breezes
      windows open
      fans shooshing the breeze into other rooms,
      other places
      down to branches that dance on the bank.

      He says:
      “I’ll take you there.
      Our time is in the river.”

      And he walks her to the river
      in his arms,
      down steep banks and forgiving grasses,
      beside boulders set by force and happenstance.

      She says
      nothing, but smiles.
      He stands in the river, her in his arms,
      and she smiles in the river

      He says of the river:
      “It reminds me of a revisiting of things permanent:
      A campfire under a pastel prairie turning to wine,
      the susurration of the river,” the one in which they both stand, holding hands.
      “Of a love, not changed by the steel edge
      of a river’s time
      not chained to the ebb and flow of the moon,
      but only grown, rooted, and flourished
      next to the river.”

      A peace now,
      even in the constant and distant clamor
      of crickets,
      that has always been there
      and always will be.

      He says:
      “How similar it all is,”
      As if he could see what proceeds,
      like the slices of an orange,
      the river’s swell and balance of direction.

      And she knows, setting her book on the bank,
      there will always be rivers,
      but this river is hers,
      this river is his.

      And they stand
      in the tender musk of wet soil
      in the beckoning light of dusk, or dawn,
      in the river.

    • Mid Summer Fragment

      Fireworks

      The dog whimpers
      and you slowly kick your legs
      down to the concrete floor
      like an old hinge.

      The irregular, but constant flash and pop of idiocy
      rages outside as you pull on the haunches of your dog
      from underneath your bed.

      If only your dog liked scotch
      as much as you do.

    • American Auto

      In the future
      cars not only drive themselves
      but start conversations with each other
      in primitive Morse code:

      Honk – high beams – left turn – honk
      means, “stop driving like a douche-bag”
      I think.

      Their horns squawk with mechanical pubescence
      testing limits of horsepower, torque, love.

      The cars get mean,
      shed mufflers on speed bumps,
      stay out too late,
      drink leaded.
      Form cliques. BMW and Mercedes,
      Tesla and Audi to harass the dwindling
      human drivers in endangered species
      (Nissan Stanzas, Ford Taurus’s),
      the laughing stock,
      the underprivileged.

      Drive them off the road.
      Take their gas money.
      Damage their pride through
      Morse code insults completely
      lost in translation.

      Trunk – wipers – honk – honk
      “That chassis looks like American manufacturing.”
      Real scorchers.

      While passengers drink champagne
      or take naps with the kids.
      Dad reaches over to adjust the AC
      on their way to the baseball game
      in Detroit or Oakland.

    • On the wind catching your fly line causing you to curse loudly and miss a trout the size of your hamstring

      I.

      My father never taught me,
      he was too busy being a good father
      or a good engineer.

      I flail, land, and intertwine transparent line,
      but the fish know my ruse.
      They laugh.

       

      II.

      I’m casting by moonlight
      fluidly but something is different:
      a change in the stars, perhaps,
      or a new nightingale coo.

      And the river is turned, sucked
      into the mountains
      instead of the sea.
      The moon, not knowing what she does,
      turns her bright face closer
      To smell the night air fresh with closeness before unknown.
      Who wouldn’t?
      Who wouldn’t take pause to notice
      the peat, the pine, the discrete nothing
      and everything of a mountain river?

      And the river lifts
      and I’m still casting
      like an idiot,
      just swinging that fucking stick,
      like an owner shaking a ball before an excited dog,
      into the river now above me.

      And the river lifts out of its bed
      dropping rain and minnows
      onto its barren and rocky bed
      on its path towards the peaks,
      a cloud
      a dense one with malice in its head.

      Spring catalysts turn to fountains,
      tiny geysers
      for deer and huckleberry
      displacing water into air.
      Fawns prance like children in sprinklers.

      The moon is down.
      The night alive with change,
      a new order, a new geography.

      Scientists will calculate and strain:
      drinking coffee and sit cinder eyed
      at flows and screens.

      And I will fish.

    • symbiotics

      During a brief and passionate
      argument
      with a robot

      he threw my favorite potted plant
      out of our spaceship’s cockpit window.

      The depressurization sucked me out,
      like the pearl from an oyster,

      and the robot never laughed again.
      He had never laughed in the first place,

      but then, neither had the plant.

    • Three Houses

      A fistfight just started
      on new stained steps.

      It’s a nasty one, the fight,
      blood on the buttons already

      but the morning is early
      and yet to be marred

      as these two raise voices
      and swing between curses

      now in the flower beds
      of my grandfather’s second built home,

      punching directive at who will
      grace the neighborhood.

      He sits on the steps
      and wipes his glasses, pondering

      trusses of  the skeleton
      of his third unfinished house

      where he lives in a room meant for preserves
      under a floor meant for carpet.

      They crush the half silence
      of the first Sunday of August

      with cars slowing to watch
      and the wind shakes the daisies.

      He waves from his steps
      as the motorists crawl,

      church bound fingers point
      with mouths agape.

      And the wind shakes the daisies
      planted by his wife.

    • The Oceans Geographic

      The Oceans Geographic

      I.

      The charm of daylight savings time
      brushes him onto the porch before
      the coffee cools. The moon flirts with perfection
      filtered through night air tightening with cold
      harsh on his lungs, but the kind of cold
      that one might associate with preservation,
      like snow at the dump.

      His eyes remain closed
      as if the surf could sting
      at this distance, yet it dampens the notebook
      face up on the table before him.

      A long deep breath and it’s
      enough to be thinking about
      a symphony long forgotten in composer and melody
      and all sounds relapse under

      the percussion of lavender.
      A glint of silver on the surf turns out
      to be a bag of crisps.

      And it all reminds him of
      the triviality of what’s happened
      but how serious it all was.

      II.

      They will know who wrote King Lear,
      as he always had.

      And the friend at the of the line
      doesn’t pick up
      but that’s okay because the letter mailed
      will be far more important.

      Anyway the girl walking by
      breaks her gait,
      or you think she does,
      as a half-smile overshadows
      the turquoise dress, a dress
      meant for a bridesmaid.
      The receiver drifts slowly from your ear
      at the same speed she passes before you,
      friction of ringtone, cold air, and playful lust
      separating in a zero gravity drift.

      And your friend, three hours in the future
      feels the drag as well, you imagine.

      Or maybe it’s meant for
      the crow picking at popcorn
      in the field behind you.

    • Lament of the Frontier

      (For my grandfather)

      In the Dry Land, rain fell sideways heavy and half-frozen
      upon tilted hats and upturned collars the way it always fell.
      Forlorn thunder, the steady brown dirt and grass of all seasons
      trembled in the warmest winter since you left for the city.

      I rode and rode the hills
      to watch the flood plain fill.

      There is no riding left. No bluff, river, or levee.
      Who cut these mountains small?
      Who planted the bones of this wheat seed
      now choked with wintry deluge,
      and choked with heat soon
      yielding a sweltered summer wind which echoes
      down the valleys?

      Is this wind distilled in the same snowcapped mountains
      from your farthest trip West?
      What of those two perfect days
      saddled between solstice
      when wind is swollen of wild daisy or huckleberry and there’s nothing
      but to stand knee deep and watch the peach sky drop?

      Fence posts rot. Barbed wire is planted in the earth
      and blood, glove, and gun are interned with the buried borders.
      And those who once rode are now snow-covered,
      swollen.

      Crippled and shrunken like the trees
      of the desert.
      The desert that might swallow child or cattle.
      And I’ll die here too,
      someday.