Music For The Soul
By Darryl Duke. Filed in Other Stuff |Tags: Darryl Duke, kindness, love, music for the soul, soul, why i pray in the shower
Due to my classroom antics in my high school days I was quite a handful for my teachers, but because most of them actually enjoyed my humor they would let me entertain the other students, at least for a little while. One teacher in particular even let me write poems on one of the blackboards every Friday and they often had a nice message to them. She was an English teacher who some of the students made fun of , but I was never one of them. I was lousy at English though, because I never felt the need to know what things like adverbs and pronouns were. Looking back now as a writer I certainly wish I would have cared more, but I did learn something important in that class. She announced our final grades one day at the end of the school year and when she came upon my name and my grade, she said with sternness and enthusiasm that she gave me a passing grade due solely to my classroom participation. This shocked me of course as I thought I had surely failed English, until I realized this wasn’t just a reward for livening up her classroom, but for making her life a little bit nicer by being kind to her. I heard she eventually left her job as a result of the torment she received by the students and I hope where ever she is she sees this and remembers me. I want her to know that although I may have made her life a little more enjoyable, she did more for me than just give me a passing grade. She made an insecure and fearful young teenager feel better about himself and I will always remember her for that. I also hope my grammar has been correct throughout this post. The following poem is a short one I wrote on her blackboard over 33 years ago. It doesn’t necessarily have much of a message to it, but I like the “music for the soul” part and I know she enjoyed those Fridays when I would write my poems.
If Fridays were made for partyin
And music for the soul
Then let everyday be Friday
And everyone rock and roll
