Oak tree

We had some beautiful fall days this week, the kind of days that make you find ways to take your class outside. And so it was that we walked down the road to a tree, an Oak tree that demands to be noticed. My students were instructed to speak only in English on our field trip (it is their habit to speak Danish whenever they are talking among themselves) and when we reached the tree they were to start by recording words that came to them as they looked at the tree. From there they wrote whatever they were inspired to write, for some that meant very little, not enough structure, but most made the experience clearly worthwhile. On the way back to school one student commented that it was the first time they had done anything of this sort in English class, he asked me if I had seen ‘Dead Poet’s Society’ and drew comparisons to the movie and told me that in his experience teachers didn’t like the movie because of the way Robin Williams teaches. We had a good conversation about teaching and about learning, for some the walk to the tree was the best possible way to spend the class, for others it was not structured enough, they didn’t know what I wanted.

Over the next couple of days I wondered what I would write for sharing at the beginning of next class, I looked at the tree through the bus window, I procrastinated, and then on a spare block between classes I visited Wikipedia and enlisted it’s help with my poem.

600 existing species

evergreen and deciduous

your flowers are catkins

your fruit, a nut called acorn in a cup-like structure – a cupule

Genus Quercus

Genus Cyclobalanopsis

high tannin offers you resistance

your grain marks are appealing

a keystone species in a wide range of habitats

you live in constant fear of Sudden Oak Death,

and Oak Wilt

a symbol of strength and endurance

sacred to Zeus and Thor

Oak tree I hardly knew thee

when I stood beneath your stretched out arms

and thought of you as

towering,

lonely,

dying.

I know this post is incomplete without a photo of the tree but when I bought my cellphone (my first) upon arrival here I went for the cheapest option, I should have got one with a camera.