Remembering Sabrina
While a teacher wonders if she’s reaching her students, an idea takes root and blossoms into understanding
By Rosalinda Psolka ’90

A noiseless patient spider,
I marked where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be formed, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
— Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

 first encountered these lines as a high school junior in an honors English class. After the teacher loftily expounded on Whitman’s verse, we ever-diligent students wrote essays that spit back just what the Mrs. ordered. A few years later, as I taught English in an inner-city high school, I rediscovered Whitman in a more fruitful way.

New teachers’ job assignments are sometimes the toughest: overcrowded classes filled with poorly skilled or unmotivated students. In my school, we rookies received paltry advice and few course materials. However, floundering can also be construed as freedom if the right mindset is put in motion. I opted for creative approaches.

My goal was to have my students understand the value of words in everyday life. Using methods common today but unconventional in 1970, I assigned multimedia projects through which students could explore themes using musical or graphic presentations. In a school where graffiti was a problem, my hallway bulletin boards filled with song
lyrics and eye-catching artwork were left unharmed.

My large seventh period “B” section was a talkative but good-natured group of non-college-prep juniors. Generally I was amused by their spirit, although presenting the usual fare to them was not always easy.

Amid this boisterous gang sat one silent student. A tall, bone-thin girl, Sabrina did her work faithfully if not with any marked promise. Because she neither excelled nor disturbed the class, she was a student who could easily slip by an instructor’s attention. Until one day late in the spring term.

I had taken on the task of teaching Leaves of Grass. I eagerly “taught my brains out” for a couple of weeks, trying to connect these city kids to an ancient radical rhymer. Spinning those threads out, I was never certain how well I reached my listeners.

Then one afternoon Sabrina—who had barely spoken the entire year—approached me. She shyly opened her slender hand to show me a swatch of newly grown grass and asked, “Which one is Walt Whitman?”

A simple question, but a grand moment for me. A connection had been made intellectually and personally with a student that I had least expected to absorb the poet’s message.
I have often told this story to show that teaching is an unpredictable and rewarding business. Continually casting filaments to our students, we never quite know what takes hold and what does not. Both the process and final result lend the profession an excitement unmatched, I believe, in most occupations.

It’s doubtful that a middle-aged Sabrina would recall this incident let alone imagine the impact she made on her instructor. In the best of educational exchanges, students should realize that they weave magical threads of their own.

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Ros Psolka is a publicist for the office of enrollment management at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. A resident of Little Egg Harbor, she teaches writing as an adjunct instructor in Stockton’s General Studies Division.