Brooke Forbes

What is it to bestow your knowledge on another?
To leave a fingerprint on another human,
Marking them in a curriculum born of your own creation.

What is it to grade the work of another human?
As if every act of expression wasn’t a perfect act in itself,
And every child or adult deserving of mutual respect and acknowledgment.

What is it to lead a group of students?
To take then on a journey through time and place,
Showing them worlds within worlds of knowledge and human connection.

If the teacher is a fountain of knowledge,
And holder of progress,
Then the student is carrier pigeon,
Flying through the sky with messages from another vessel.

We warn teachers not to subject students to their own agenda,
Like they couldn’t,
Like they haven’t already subscribed to a predetermined destiny,
Like they we’re part of a well-oiled machine.

Walk with me, the teacher says,
I will show you the way,
Forward.
Backwards one step.
To the left and forward again.

What is a teacher?
But a mark of time on another’s culture and space.
But appropriations on appropriations,
Of late-stage capitalism and a Department’s cliché.

But still, there’s that hold.
Teacher to student,
Student to teacher,
One forming the other,
And the other informing the next.

Individualism,
We preach,
While trying to execute our curriculums of mass production.

What is a teacher but another human being,
Perfectly existing,
And existing imperfectly,
With the hope that one day,
They will reimagine a revolution of sorts,
Through words on paper,
The sound of cohorts joining cohorts,
Building to a crescendo of human capacity.