There’s a great deal of talk these days about teachers being underpaid and underappreciated. And both are true. But I consider two pieces of student writing I possess to be treasures that no amount of money could purchase. They are the golden fruit of that magic that happens only in a classroom: offering the right assignment at precisely the exact psychological moment a youngster is ready to receive it — the treasures of being a teacher.
When I retired after teaching high school English for 25 years in two Vermont schools, I took both of these pieces of student writing with me because they uniquely captured Vermont. Both of them featured cows.
One was written in 1986 by a junior boy at Whitcomb High School in Bethel; the other in 1990 by a sophomore boy at Hartford High School.
Each piece in a different way reveals the charm of being a young Vermonter raised near animals and pastures in the last decades before the digital world overwhelmed childhood.
I found it a privilege to read both of these student pieces and the fact that I have saved them for three decades indicates my esteem for them as examples of good writing, despite a few insignificant technical flaws.
Copyright law does not allow me to publish them in their entirety, but I am allowed to share excerpts in the service of my profession, teaching.
Here is a quote from the Hartford tenth-grader’s heartwarming piece titled My First Calf. It is about the experience of birth that young shepherds have been assisting with for thousands of years (even before Bethlehem), an experience of the natural world that I never knew as a boy raised in suburban Connecticut.
This sophomore’s description is so vivid I feel as if I were a witness to it myself, even as I read it today. Skillful choice of specific details is the mark of good writing, especially in the service of suspense. Ernest Hemingway would definitely approve of this frantic, bloody, somewhat violent barn scene, from its stanchions to sawdust bin to cobwebby gloves.
The next morning I helped (the farm hand) do chores and he had to leave and I stayed with the cow coming in.
As I was listening I could hear Nancy the cow grunting so I leaned the shovel against one of the stanchions. I went in the milkroom and grabbed some old, cobwebby gloves. On my way back through the barn I grabbed a couple of pieces of bailing twine to wrap around the calf’s feet. I went back through the barn and grabbed the shovel and went to the sawdust bin and got a couple of shovels of sawdust to bed the cow with.
Nancy started smelling the hay in front of her and layed down in the clean bedding I had just put down. She spread all her legs as if she was dead. I saw her gut going in and out. I could see her grunting and pushing at the same time. Finally she pushed hard enough so her water ball came out at me and drenched my new boots. I shook most of the slime off but what remained was blood. It got all over the walls and some in my hair.
She stood up and started having contractions and pushed enough so the head and feet were just barely sticking out. She pushed enough so I could get my twine around its feet.
I worked with her. As she pushed, I pulled. I could see its tongue hanging out so I pulled the next time she pushed and the calf came out in a flash, knocking me down on my butt in a pile of cow dung and some afterbirth. I got up and brought the calf up in front of Nancy so she could clean him up. It was roughly a 90-pound bull calf. While Nancy was cleaning Myron I went home and washed my hands.
This 16-year-old began his essay by declaring, I am writing this story because I feel that people should realize how much of a job it takes to be a farmer, or just raise a few animals.
What he achieved in addition, by the power of his language, is a moving description of a boy’s initiation into that mystery of blood and pain by which nature makes one into two, a mystery which has awed humans for thousands of years and still does so today.
The next quote comes from an essay by a 17-year-old junior at Whitcomb High School. It is a satire — exaggeration for the sake of effect — and its words are designed to raise the blood pressure of the adult reader, especially a teacher. It captures the Huck Finn, Dennis-the-Menace mischievousness of a teenager living in the Green Mountains of the 1980s.
The title of this piece is “How to go cow-tipping and be successful.” Wikipedia says cow-tipping is “an urban legend.” This student makes it seem real, all in the service of humor, or at least with a wicked twinkle in his eye.
Cow tipping needs a certain type of vehicle. You need to obtain, preferably legally, a maroon car, not a truck, but a car! Cows cannot see maroon. I have figured this out through experience. The car must be generally small and have a loud muffler, this is to fool the cows into thinking it’s just thunder they hear. The last step is to dress properly. It is a necessity to wear old clothes and old sneakers since cow plops tend to be present in most pastures.
Now that your equipment is ready you can head out to a part of town where you can park and not be seen or ambushed by your town constable. Now, drink three beers each, make sure to drink them one right after the other and quickly. This should begin a relaxation period since you probably will be feeling excited by now. Next, each of you needs to smoke two cigarettes each, this also aiding in the anti-anxiety plot.
You are now ready to find a pasture. Finding a cow pasture may be difficult, if you live otherwheres than Vermont. If not then any cow pasture will do. Once you find a pasture, with cows, you should wait until 9:13 p.m., no sooner, no later, and then enter the pasture. Tell your friends to hide while you examine the cows. You need to examine the cows very carefully to make sure which ones are asleep and which ones are faking to be asleep. Approach the cow front and wave your hands in front of the eyes to see if the slightest quiver is made. If the cow makes no movement, signal your friends. Your friends should be behind some trees while making moooo noises, an added cow distraction tactic. You all should approach the cow very quietly.
Since the cow is standing, and weighs approximately 1,500 to 1,800 pounds, you’ll need to all give a substantial shove. Place one of your friends near the head/neck region, another near the stomach/udder region, and another near the ass/tail region. I have found that counting to 10 and then shoving all together works well. Make sure for safety’s sake that you exit the pasture quickly after the cow has fallen, because most cows will kick with great force after being awoken.
The junior and sophomore who wrote these papers in 1986 and 1990 are now 47 and 42 years old, by my calculations. I very much doubt that they saved their high school writing these nearly 30 years.
But I did.
If those students — now adults — are reading this article, I hope they will contact me so I can return my copy of their full essays to them. They deserve to be published in their entirety, for they capture the experience of boyhood in the pastures of the Green Mountains in the final decades of the millennium with its cow plops and hay and laughter and new-boots-suddenly-being-spoiled. And of working with a cow as it gives birth — not only to a calf, but to a farmer who a few minutes before was just a boy.
More than a quarter century has gone by since these pieces were written and they are still alive in front of our eyes. That is what words can do. That is why I teach literature.
Paul Keane of Hartford taught English in Vermont schools from 1987-2012.