Minnesota teacher publishes poetry collection about what keeps him returning to the classroom
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By this time next week, K-12 schools across the state will be in session. Some have already started. Students will settle into their new classrooms, and teachers will polish their lesson plans for a new set of learners.
One of those teachers pulling out his attendance charts is Patrick Hueller, who teaches English at Irondale High School in the northern Twin Cities metro. His poetry collection, "Falling, In Love with Teaching," launches this week, and he’ll read at Subtext Books in St. Paul on Thursday at 7 p.m.
At 43, Hueller has taught for nearly 20 years, including his time as a graduate instructor while earning his MFA in fiction at the University of Minnesota. Hueller writes novels and short stories, so he surprised himself when his writing about a classroom encounter came out in the form of a poem. The subject: a fight that broke out in his ninth grade classroom while he was teaching “Romeo and Juliet.”
“Two girls started cussing at each other, jumped up. One got on the table, and they broke out into this fight,” he said. “Within a few seconds, I was in between the two girls, trying to like get in between this fight, and I got hit by a water bottle and scratched a little bit.”
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At the time, he says, the big thing on his mind was getting them back to Shakespeare's play.
“I just wanted them as teenagers who were living one emotion to the other to read a play that is about teenagers living from one emotion to the other.”
Hueller's collection reads like a series of vignettes, by turns heartfelt and humorous, earnest and self-deprecating. He starts the collection the way he started: by falling in love with reading.
He recalls his second-grade teacher, Mr. K., reading aloud and doing all the voices to Roald Dahl's novel, “Danny the Champion of the World.” The main characters are poachers. “Isn't that wrong?” Hueller recalls a kid asking. “Stealing animals?”
“What do you think?” responded Mr. K.
For second-grade Hueller, that invitation to form his own opinion was exhilarating.
“I got to decide for myself how I felt about that. I've always felt like reading is this way in which you actually feel like you can be totally safe. You're just secure sitting there, hopefully with a roof above your head, etc., but you also get to go off on dangerous adventures or think thoughts that you're not sure are okay to think, and so reading has always been that kind of an outlet for me.”
There are poems in this collection about books that make students think, classroom moments where everything aligns, and ones that definitely don’t. Literature, Hueller maintains, helps us restore our humanity.
Hueller hopes his collection feels like a different — and eminently relatable — kind of book about teaching. It’s not a guide to pedagogy, nor does it attempt to enumerate or solve problems with the education system.
“And while I 100 percent agree that teaching is grueling and really hard, it's also like a life-fulfilling thing for me and for some of the great teachers I know,” he said. “And so I just wanted to write a book from the perspective without ever ducking it, without ever pretending like it's like 'yay teaching!' Like, what is it actually like to be a teacher in the immediate here and now.”
One poem, for example, describes a normally morose student in the back of the classroom raising his hand so hard he's lifting off his chair. Maybe he knows the answer or has a burning question. Maybe he just wants a pass to the bathroom. In the poem, and the classroom, the only way to know is call on him and listen to what he says.
