When Donald Crouch first encountered Jim in his English class in rural Michigan, he saw an unhappy boy, who’d gone deep into a cocoon (茧) of silence.
Donald might have assumed that Jim was bored or uninterested or even backward. Certainly, he appeared to be all of those things.
But there was something in the young boy that lit up whenever the subject turned to poetry. It was unnoticeable, but Donald could see a shift in the boy ‘s attitude--a quiet but unmistakable enthusiasm that accompanied any discussion of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Tennyson. A twinkle in his eyes would appear whenever Donald lectured on matters of English verse, something which proved to be most appealing to the otherwise disappointed teacher. Although Jim was interested in all manners of poetry, he seemed particularly excited when Donald would discuss Walt Whitman, that greatest of American poets.
One day Donald kept Jim after school and learned that Jim stuttered ( 口吃). Donald understood that Jim had accepted the written word because the spoken word had escaped him. The next day, Donald told the pupils to write a poem. Jim turned his assignment in, and Donald was surprised by how good it was.
The teacher read the assignment over and over again in disbelief and, truth be told, with a little bit of envy; how could a student from the middle of nowhere come up with something like this? He turned his head once again to the boy and began to have an idea.
Donald had noticed earlier that Jim’s stutter disappeared whenever he quoted his favorite poets out loud .
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________The whole class turned their attention to Jim.
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