Russell J Fee's Page

“In A Dash of Expectation, Fee has packaged a keen set of observations into a great read. He gives readers a practical, moving, and seriously funny glimpse into what it’s like to go back into the classroom as a substitute teacher. Never mind pastoral images of the sweet and obedient: the students in his poems are real. That’s what makes them—and Fee’s poetry—so transcendent. Instead of languishing above a clean desk, hands clasped and crayons stored neatly in cigar boxes, they are appropriately unruly and chaotic, competitive and needy, and self-absorbed as only grade-schoolers are allowed to be. Somehow, someway, Fee has managed to not only pinpoint, but play up the most powerful and universal details of being a school kid—the kind that successfully transports us back to our own experience. Don’t miss it!”

Jill Sherer Murray, author of “Diary of a Writer in Mid-Life Crisis”

Excerpts from the Book


Eighth-Grade Boys

Reach out, and like the

newly molted crayfish in the room’s
aquarium, they scuttle away in their
suddenly too-big bodies, raw

behind claws displayed in attitudes
of threat and challenge.

Some girls are thrilled by this.


A Found Poem
From the Top Ten things learned in 2K

Number one
I lernd
to praktes
speling


The Sonogram

The polls she takes are inconclusive.
the boys voting for a boy and the girls
voting for a girl.

She then resorts to paper fortune tellers,
snapping them open and closed in a mantra
designed to snatch from the ether the secret
of the baby’s sex.

Will it be a new brother?
Will it be a new siter?

The odds prove 50:50.

Thursday she leaves early from school
to be with her mother at the doctor’s.

With science comes certainty.
“We will know tomorrow,”
she tells us.

Friday morning she slinks into class,
tapes a picture to the chalkboard, and
slumps down into her desk.

We all gather round the grainy black and gray photo.

There, like the image in the sweep
of a radar screen are two legs
crossed in perfect modesty.


Don’t Tread on Us

They teach you
in the schools of education to
reach the individual.

You’re armed with Bloom’s Taxonomy and
Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences to fire
off lesson plans targeting
every single student.

You’re trained to see all classrooms as
multicultural cocoons of individual pupae.
No child is to be left behind.

Now walk through the portal of
a fifth-grade classroom.

Inside are staring, hungry eyes.
Not the trusting orbs of the blind hatchling,
but the narrow focus of the wolf pack.


Available from SynergEbooks.com at: http://www.synergebooks.com/ebook_dashofexpectation.html
and
Amazon.com (Kindle Edition) at: http://www.amazon.com/Dash-Expectation-Poems-Classroom/dp/B0026FCKPA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241903251&sr=8-1