Dispatches from Frontier Schools

by Sarah Beddow

Dispatches from Frontier Schools is a collection of poems that pulls the reader right into the brutalities, and beauty, of teaching in a struggling charter school. With humor, wit, tears, anger, exhaustion, elation, and a refusal to give up, these poems highlight the struggles of a teacher trying to maintain her dignity and her identity and do right by her students and her own children—while being pulled apart by a system that doesn’t support or defend teachers. More than just an anthem for teachers, however, this collection is a cry for all women who try to give all they can to everything and everyone.

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Sarah Beddow’s debut full-length collection, Dispatches from Frontier Schools, is an incredibly important contribution to our public discussions about education in the United States. Her testimony, these poems, makes evident the myriad and deeply troubling flaws in our public school system(s) and highlights all the ways students are dragged through schooling that serves no one by stressing expediency, rote memorization, and parroting over intellectual challenge and critical thinking: “A. is angry with me because / I made her read this book / and this conversation hurt / her / It hurts me / too,” laments Beddow.

And behind their desks (and in their cars, and in their homes, grading papers late at night), Beddow shows us, again and again, that teachers are asked to hold an unsustainable amount of emotional, physical, and intellectual space for trends disguised as pedagogy, reactive administrative demands, and student needs that surpass the scope and breadth of K-12 training. These poems are brutal, laying bare the tragic and terrible ways our country is failing us all. But they are also full of moments that are often missing in contemporary education – like humility, compassion, and empathy: “we stand in the hallway as D. tells me / she is pregnant she is due in December She cries and covers her / face with her hands I well up but hide it by biting the inside of my bottom lip.”

This book should be required reading for career administrators, board of education politicos, and all the legislators who pay little more than lip-service to our nation’s educators. These poems—unique in structure and perspective, and full of beautifully orchestrated lyric turns—are a criticism, and a call for a reckoning, to be sure. “Wait I / I know this I remember /this This is burn/out The fire / out and in its place just / a rock lined pit,” she writes in “Re: Gratitude.” “the student who says thank you is rare You / are rare / And I look him in the eyes Then /I have to leave because soon this room will / be ablaze and I have nothing left to burn.”

~ Sarah Kain Gutowski, author of Fabulous Beast: Poems

In her memoir-in-poems Dispatches from Frontier Schools, Sarah Beddow creates a vital frontline record of American education as it abuts the pandemic. Here, we meet Beddow, a woman teacher in full, frank embodiment: an educator unwilling to subsume herself entirely to the twinned demands of capitalism and data-driven academic achievement bearing down on her and her students by her charter school employer, yet one who still burns to offer her entire intellectual and energetic self to her under-resourced students. “In the Instruction and Culture Cabinet meeting I once again / melted / when the principal asked us to be a team,” she writes in the poem “Dispatch re: White Out,” “to / buy in I buy in / I always / buy in… in the end when I arrive home I don't talk to my / family like I’ve been thinking / to and instead / I write about the day / about the exhaustion / about the students we do not serve.” Throughout Dispatches from Frontier Schools, Beddow contrasts the sterile and un-seeing language of corporate education with her own vibrant, devastating personal testimonies and disclosures, granting us an intimate, eviscerating glimpse into the negotiations, struggles, heartbreaks, and joys as lived from her side of the overflowing teacher’s desk.

~ Rachel Mennies, author of The Naomi Letters

Genres: Poetry, Memoir

124 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2022

Reviews

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of prose poems that drives deep into the heart of being a teacher and all she gives to her students, often at the detriment to her own partner, children, and well-being. These poems are brutal and beautiful, showing the reader how exhausting and uplifting it is to be a teacher, to give everything you have to your students and to get so little back.

from DISPATCH re: Critical Thinking: "Should I have muzzled the heart of myself / my heart of words and fire / to save his / ego My brother has / never had to worry about anyone / regulating his body without / his / consent / because that doesn't happen to cis straight white boys in the suburbs"

from DISPATCH re: Car Speakers: "In fourth period / it's mean girls / talking when I ask them not to / talking when I sit on their table / my ass inches from their talking / talking / talking mouths and faces / Why are you always talking / smack No one looks at me"

from DISPATCH re: Gag: "My husband says I have always been filled with righteous / indignation But I swear / I never used to be so angry / so angry all the time all the time all the time / I cannot feel / sadness anymore"

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

My wife wrote this book and I am biased, having read it from the beginning drafts. It's fantastic and incredibly sad and hopeful and, I think, tremendously important as a dispatch from the vitally important and woefully underappreciated work of teaching. I'm inarticulately proud of her and what she's done here.

[Sarah]

I've read this book a million times! Because I wrote it! Please add to your To-Read lists!

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so glad Beddow wrote this book. From one fellow teacher to another, her poems relate the completely soul-wrenching, fulfilling, yet untenable experience of teaching in public schools at the dawn of this century, particularly of teaching with the full awareness of what students of different classes and races face in this same century. Any teacher with any high hopes for student engagement in reading the world around us will see themselves in Beddow's poems. There is an urgency and an emotional engagement to her poetry, but she also doesn't sacrifice that critical distance.

I know Sarah, for complete disclosure, and she's even more awesome than you would think from these poems.

[Candice Daquin · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an incredibly ambitious collection and a very unique idea. In a series of Dispatches, totaling five years, Sarah Beddow has created a highly realistic accounting from the perspective of a frontier school teacher. In this case, the frontier refers to the Bronx and other schools where teachers are in the trenches, actively helping at risk, disadvantaged and marginalized students succeed and find their voice(s). Cleverly, Beddow uses epigraphs and in conversation echo-responses, to locate the subject of the epigraphs. Because of this, every poem is highly intentional, which is unsurprisingly for a MFA in Poetry, but not a given. This is about as far away as you can get from social media angsty memes. This is the result of hard work, literally and figuratively, and the patience of someone born to write, who waits until each piece they include in a collection, is as relevant and knife-sharp conscious as poetry can be.
understand / the grimness of / this / one Are we
drawing together for support or are we eating each other to sate
our / personal hungers We laugh again (DISPATCH re: We mustn’t dwell, no not today).
As Beddow states: “This book is in conversation with the stories, novels, poems, and other texts I shared with the students in my classroom.” When she titles a piece for example; Dispatch re: my Love: This poem is in conversation with Ntozake Shange’s “no more love poems #4,” from For colored girls. She relates this to conversations had in her classroom with her students ‘on the frontier.’ By this, Beddow isn’t patronizing or white-splanning at all. As all of us who have taught at risk youth, this is the turning point and what you can affect means everything to the future of these kids. DISPATCHES FROM FRONTIER SCHOOLS aside being clever, is Sarah Beddow’s experience of digging-deep, teaching and changing lives.
Inside they are already / tipsy and past the
point of / processing So why am / I / here Who here / can
help me (DISPATCH re: the Last Day of School).
Foremost, the value of an epigraph is immeasurable. It’s a polaroid of a moment, a snapshot in time, referencing a wider-world always. Via Beddow’s poetry, we can walk through her classroom on multiple levels; understanding what the kids were exposed to, appreciate the influences behind that exposure and their histories, and finally, how Sarah Beddow relates this back to her own existence. True, occasionally a writer can be too clever, especially with prose-poetry, but Beddow has the nuanced insight into language and how to convey enough without being too much or not substantive. It is her wield of exactly enough, that makes this collection so impactful.
I still feel / my students through their /
fear / griefs they can/not articulate Their absence is intaglio
/ a ligature circling my throat (DISPATCH re: Intaglio).
Beddow clarifies this at the end of the book: “These texts helped me understand my identity as a teacher, a mentor, a friend, a woman, and a person striving for connection. The book returns again and again specifically to Ntozake Shange’s For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf: a choreopoem, which I first read when I was a high school senior and which has served as an emotional touchstone for me ever since.” As a mixed-race queer woman myself, I can appreciate this emotional touchstone poignantly and feel throughout the collection, a respect and desire to overthrow the history of suppression, whilst admitting to the fragility and unbearable awareness of being and its inevitable toll:
You know if I got in a car wreck / at least I could / lie
down for a bit / in the quiet What would / giving up look like / (DISPATCH re: Stabbing Potatoes).
This is a collection about reaching out and recognizing the disparity in opportunity and doing something about it. Armed with an exemplary education this poet rolled up her sleeves and dived in. This is not to be dismissed, anymore than the observations her poetry makes of those experiences. They’re how things change. This is told in a dreamlike quality at times, punctuated deliberately to sound like halting thoughts, snapshot vignettes, prose-poetry at its most delectable and disjointed:
my familiar rage / turning inside out I want to feel helpful I
… we stand in our / solemn little circle swallow down
what threatens to boil over (DISPATCH re: Tea and Hot Chocolate).
I related very strongly to one concept, shared by many modern-women. The burn-out theme of doing too much, but not wanting to change that and do less. Prior to living in America, I did not possess this urge. I ate pasta at lunch and made plans for 7pm dates. America swallows and digests high-performing women. Those competitive, Alpha types who are taught ‘doing well’ affirms who they are, struggle when they’re not busy, to come up with meaning when the world tells them it’s never enough. I immigrated to America and recognized you cannot succeed without being this way. Standing in two worlds, I appreciate the pitfalls of this, and so can the poet, who articulates it perfectly:
I am wicks on wicks
on wicks eating wax like cotton candy / I am working harder
than / ever because I am distancing myself from / my colleagues
from / the children How do you fix the problems and leave the
problems at / once (DISPATCH re: the Wick Dipper in the Anthropologie Candle Accessories Set).
It is not my place to say, American women shouldn’t fear being unoccupied, or should take more time from work. But from the vantage point of a reader, I can remind myself it’s not the only way, or indeed, a happy way for many of us. The courage it takes to admit this, even as you may not change it, is the vein of poetry in its most confessional mien. It is both a world I relate to, and one I wish to escape from, and the poet also feels this, the push-and-pull of ‘come nearer but go further’ which is such a blatant expose of the teaching process in its modern, exhausting, exhilarating, terrifying, meaningful self.
My principal docked me a point / on professionalism
What interactions / have I had marked by / dishonesty I am
honest / to my own detriment When / my moral compass points
/ me down an unmarked path I make of / myself a pain a nag
a grind in the / gears of the establishment Stripped / to nothing (DISPATCH re: Domain 4f Showing Professionalism).
It would be too simplistic to regard this as the cult of perfectionism, or the well-meaning efforts of a liberal teacher. Neither sum up the complexity and intrigue of DISPATCHES FROM FRONTIER SCHOOLS or their author. Without knowing the history behind it more than as reader, I take away a lot more than a keeping of histories. These prose-poems are smart as hell. They have myriad concepts and worlds within each one. Most of all the strength of a woman, not willing to be erased, or let her students be lost, in this world of erasure and inequity.
the point is that even when
I was / 17 I was taught / to doubt my perceptions told to leave
the / subtext buried and button down / my intuition Now /
is a year-long flickering of gaslights We have meetings In them
/ I am on fire / with righteous fury and intelligent solutions (DISPATCH re: Frank Romano).
We face a real challenge, as educators, in a world that reads less than ever before; fiction and non-fiction, but reads constantly online. We face a real challenge socially with the divide growing, and women’s rights eroded. We’re at a crossroads and it’s writers like Sarah Beddow who have the best education and all the advantage to effect change, who actually make that effort. In writing her experiences, she awakens us to the critical nature of educating and exposing minds to literature and beyond. This highly clever, likeable book, is the canary in the coal mine. If we don’t keep trying, whole generations could be lost to the beauty of this literary canon. What literary-activists like Beddow want, is to expand the canon to include diverse voices, and through her teaching she’s creating the next generation of potential writers who will do just that. In admitting she cannot know what they go through, but also admitting what she goes through, she points to the most important thing; none of us should deny our trauma or compare it. It all counts. All of it.
I
cannot be / real My whole schtick is being / real But when I am
real they / laugh They asked / Ms. Beddow were you ever /
bullied and I / paused because no but also / does a year of slut-
shaming count / as bullying It must it hurt / so much but I do
not know In that pause / they laughed and I left / the room to
stand in the hallway because / how do I stand in a room with more
kids who will / litigate my adolescent traumas and find them /
insignificant (DISPATCH re: this Darkness).
By being vulnerable and at the same time, taking no shit; Sarah Beddows inhabits an experience sufficiently to share with us, the needs she identifies, relating them to her own experiences, which is what every human does, and transforming all these thoughts into poetry we can’t get enough of.

[Melissa Boles · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an incredible collection! I have friends and family who are teachers, and this rang so true to the stories they've told me. I loved the way that these poems were written. Each dispatch told such a powerful story.

[Corinne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing like reliving 6 years of your career through dispatches! “Dispatch re: Safety on the Boulevard” and “Love Letter re: Red Shift” had me in tears, and I like that they’re juxtaposed in the book. A gritty, heart-wrenching rendition of teaching at Frontier.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

*Disclaimer* I provided a blurb for this book, so I'm biased. Also, I was already in love with these poems from the minute Beddow began posting drafts of them to social media as a kind of catharsis -- and I was thrilled to learn she eventually put them all into a book. Here's my very wordy, but very sincere, endorsement of Beddow's poetry, and this book in particular:

Sarah Beddow’s debut full-length collection, Dispatches from Frontier Schools, is an incredibly important contribution to our public discussions about education in the United States. Her testimony, these poems, makes evident the myriad and deeply troubling flaws in our public school system(s) and highlights all the ways students are dragged through schooling that serves no one by stressing expediency, rote memorization, and parroting over intellectual challenge and critical thinking: “A. is
angry with me because / I made her read this book / and this conversation hurt / her / It hurts me /
too,” laments Beddow.

And behind their desks (and in their cars, and in their homes, grading papers late at night), Beddow
shows us, again and again, that teachers are asked to hold an unsustainable amount of emotional,
physical, and intellectual space for trends disguised as pedagogy, reactive administrative demands, and student needs that surpass the scope and breadth of K-12 training. These poems are brutal, laying bare the tragic and terrible ways our country is failing us all. But they are also full of moments that are often missing in contemporary education – like humility, compassion, and empathy: “we stand in the hallway as D. tells me / she is pregnant she is due in December She cries and covers her / face with her hands I well up but hide it by biting the inside of my bottom lip.”

This book should be required reading for career administrators, board of education politicos, and all the legislators who pay little more than lip-service to our nation’s educators. These poems – unique in structure and perspective, and full of beautifully orchestrated lyric turns -- are a criticism, and a call for a reckoning, to be sure. “Wait I / I know this I remember /this This is burn/out The fire / out and in its place just / a rock lined pit,” she writes in “Re: Gratitude.” “the student who says thank you is rare You / are rare / And I look him in the eyes Then /I have to leave because soon this room will / be ablaze and I have nothing left to burn.”

[Laura Passin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and harrowing book of poems chronicling the ongoing collapse of a charter school. As a teacher who once taught at a similar school, with similarly infuriating policies and impossible demands, I felt deep recognition in these poems. Beddow has captured the terrible bind of loving your students and hating your job; every teacher who's felt crushed by an administration should read this book.

[Kaitlyn Hardee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved reading these poems, they were extremely well written and brutally honest.

It hurt to read these dispatches. Each one stuck in my skin and ripped off my comfortability. This collection forced my eyes to open wide and made me admit I knew nothing about what it means to be a teacher. Beddow taught me the realities of the job that textbooks and college courses alone never could.