Poop is, for me, a subject of great interest. I’m illustrating these paragraphs with the floriform poop of some anonymous dog. I noticed it – off to the side, out of the way, where it still managed to look so eager to please – on a very cold Sunday, as I ‘ran’ slowly through my neighborhood. The radial arrangement of the poop stood out, cheerily, close to the curb, among the empty cars and loaded trash bags. I came back later and took the photograph.
I’m tempted to say that poop wears many hats in the 3’s classroom – but I’m going to say, instead, that there are various contexts and tones for our conversations about poop. Everyone knows that feces makes for excellent meal-time discussion, and by mid-year ‘poopy head’ crops up in the volleys of insulting names which are traded when conversations flag. It is the meal-time job of teachers to foster conversation and discourage poop-talk proliferation. I sometimes feel that I am tending a precious, life-preserving bit of flame…mustn’t let it go out or we’ll be left in the cold, dark wilderness. I try all sorts of tinder: topics relating to popular films: “What do you think Mowgli eats out in the jungle? Do you think Buzz Lightyear has a mom?” To events from the recent past: “Did you slide down the fire pole on the big climber today? Who likes to do that?” Or future: “What will you do on your birthday?” But sometimes poop has got too strong a hold on the imagination and nothing will do but “Poop, you’re a poopy head!” I learned from a former colleague that one can say: “You are talking a lot about poop. I wonder if you need to go sit on the toilet and make a poop?” The children recoil, feeling sorry for me, no doubt – I’m so literal-minded. They sober up for a while, probably dreading the day they will be as mirthless as I. An intriguing scenario presents itself on the day when lunch seems to BE poop, as recently happened when, as lunch approached we passed through the hall by the kitchen. “Smells like poop,” the children pronounced, “ehhww.” The scent was actually a lentil soup with parsnips and cabbage pureed and blended in. Many children did eat the accompanying rolls, a few tasted the soup itself, and some lost their appetites even for the lovely oranges. It was a quiet, brief meal.
Sly children find ways to weave poop into discussions without directly intending insult. Rita and Dorothea chatted over apple quarters at snack time. Dorothea (I call her Dorrie but she corrects me in her sweetly breathless voice, slightly accented, hinting at her German/English bilingualism: “Doruh-TAY-ah, it’s not Dorrie”) tells a long, long, story of her doll’s birthday. “Today is Pupa’s birthday. And she was so naughty! And…” Rita smiles deeply – she has dimples at the tops of her cheeks just below her eyes, and dimples below the corners of her mouth. She shrugs and tilts her head. “Pupa rhymes with POOP,” she observes. Dorothea stops, her smile falls quickly away, first from her eyes, then from her lips. “Noo!” she begins. Florian who gave no previous sign of following Dorothea’s narrative adds his voice, now, to hers. “No, no.” He tells Rita, “It’s PUMBAA, it’s Pumbaa.” He goes back to his own thoughts, working from friendly Pumbaa, the warthog in Disney’s “Lion King” to terrible Scar, the mean, MEAN lion. Florian, quietly sings “Be Prepared,” Scar’s anthem to shittiness. The girls drop the topic of Pupa, Pumbaa, and poop. They drop their snack trash into the slop bucket and sit down at the drawing table to turn apples into ideas, into action, into images, and eventually, into poop.
Some children are, at three, still quite ambivalent about releasing their poop to the larger world. They want to poop in a diaper, or not at all; they are masters in the strategic deployment of poop. Eoghan sometimes poops in a pull-up and sometimes in his underpants and sometimes in the toilet. He’s in love with Sponge Bob. And with Alvin and the Chipmunks The Squeakquel – but he’s got Sponge Bob on his underpants…and Dragon Tales on his pull-up: Eoghan has licensed characters all over his nether regions. At three-and-a-half, Eoghan is not all that interested in toilet training. He doesn’t mind his pull-up and when he’s just in underwear he soaks his velour track suit with urine and goes on with his day. I didn’t notice the damp on the navy blue until late in the afternoon by which time the cloth was cold with wet. I would not have noticed, actually, except he called for help with a poop. It must be acknowledged that pooping at school is a big deal. Eoghan has done it five times. Twice in a pull-up, twice in the toilet, once in underpants. Today the poop is in the toilet and Eoghan seems exhilarated. He said, as he absent-mindedly wiped his bottom: “I made chicken nuggets. With my poop!” He directed me to look in the toilet at the small compact forms, well settled in the depths of the bowl. My assistant is particularly averse to Eoghan’s poops. Their scent suggests something distressingly ancient, formed of animal proteins, fats, and many days of bacterial hoopla. With my limited sense of smell I am the designated poop abatement technician.
Last year Magnus, a broad, tall, and anguished four year old, spent a fair amount of time worrying about which foods are transformed into poop. Ok: broccoli can turn into poop. It DOES turn into poop. But ice cream, it doesn’t turn into poop. I wonder what he did think happened to the ice cream. Hopefully he concluded that ice cream – delicious and cool and acquainted with joy –turns right into your body (with a small, bell-like sound effect representing that instantaneity. Gling!)
Of course, there is the shit that is not poop at all. Take for instance the Daily Health And Safety Checklist devised by the city agency under whose regulatory oversight we operate. “A walk-through of the classroom must occur at the beginning of each day” the checklist begins. There are 10 or 12 items that must be initialed each day. The checklist proves (!) that I haven’t just come in, turned on the lights, hung up my coat and said, “You can God Damn come on in kids!” but that I have, instead, cleared away accumulations of garbage, placed on high shelves all the knives, shivs, and box-cutters that I so often leave strewn about the classroom, repaired broken toys, and ensured that the small hanging thermometer in the fridge is indeed hanging in the fridge. I don’t initial the checklist daily. Once every several months I sit down and spend 20 minutes writing my initials in columns of boxes representing days and weeks. I place the checklists in the mailbox of my boss. He places them in a file. The care I take to ensure that the classroom is safe, engaging, beautiful (enough) is part of me already – metabolized from many nourishing sources. The checklists are shit, the stuff I do not need, the stuff that adds nothing to me.
This past weekend I found and re-read about a dozen shitty poems from my freshman year in college. I had just turned 17; I was melodramatic, isolated by my sobriety, awkwardly verbose, and (inevitably, given all that) a writer of unrestrained awfulness. I seem, also, to have been unable to spell stitch, though I was compelled to use stitch/unstitch again and again, in too many drafts of more than one poem, always to ill effect. I have long thought, and said, that I gave up writing poetry when I realized I didn’t have patience for reading other people’s poems. It just seemed rude, in some way. I now wonder whether I didn’t also grasp, in an unconscious reckoning, that my poems were simply terrible and I should stop writing them. They were shit but shit as an indicator that nourishment has been taken in, metabolized and transformed into life, intelligence, action. The intelligence and action were just somewhat delayed in their emergence. This past weekend, then, I threw the poems away, the whole sheaf of Eaton’s Corrasable Bond typing paper with successive versions of each anoxic heap, showing the occasional emendation, penned in my self-conscious, adolescent hand. I could write on this subject – shit and language – for such along while. I haven’t got all the ideas straightened out, or looped together, yet. For now (until then) to keep my place, I imagine my teaching life as an inversion of the poems: it is the fruit of thought and experience, and not the material shed as a by-product.
