​Once upon a time there were two girls who became the best of friends. They played in the sun and in salty ocean waves.  They wrote notes to each other in class and talked on the phone all night.  After school, they snuck off to get pizza.  They drove far away to see baseball games.  When these girls became women, they went off into the world. 
 
The world separated them for a time.  Each experienced a heartbreak: one found love and lost it and one didn’t find love at all. After these heartbreaks, they found each other again.  They went off to get meatballs and salads on Saturday nights.  They flew far away to visit the best castles and sleep in the grandest of canopy beds and they’d return from their travels and talk about their memories together and laugh and laugh.
 
But one day, the heartbreak of the world that held so strong in one beloved friend turned into a black cancer that spread throughout her body.  For one year she tried to fight it and her friend cared for her.  But she slipped away and died.  The friend wept.  She wrapped herself in their memories and in afghans because there was nothing else to hold on to.  There, a black sadness grew inside her until in the third week, in the third month, ten years after her best friend, she died too. 
 
Weeks before she died, she had a revelation.  “I’ve finally let her go,” she said.  “I needed to let my best friend go.”
 
On her deathbed she arrived.  Blood was drawn in long lines like the red carpet. Doctors clicked pens, snapping away like paparazzi. With morphine flowing through her veins, she cried out victoriously, “I made it!  I finally made it!”
 
“Yes, you did!” I laughed and laughed.  “You made it.”

​My students stopped talking to me.  So, I stopped talking to them.  So there.
 
Despite my best efforts at eliciting answers and coaxing their voices to come out of hiding, I failed.  I’d never encountered such silence in the classroom before.  After our reading, I would ask, “So, what do you think?”  Silence pounded like slow drum beats.  They stared at me, occasionally blinking their wide eyes.  I tried again.  “Hello, how was your weekend?” Boom.  The silence crashed hard and their vacant faces withstood the blow.  On the third day, I got super casual, “How are you?” Boom. I heard someone blink.  Boom.  It was my death drum song. 
 
Had their bodies been taken over by alien drones and their spirits sucked out into space, being held in jars as specimens in some experimentation program?  Were their minds focused on getting their next incoming text message?  Was I, as a teacher, now irrelevant since they had Google and they could just ‘Google it’?  Google required no feedback and certainly no critical thinking.  Google thrived in silent responses, while I was dying because of them.
 
I got on my knees and begged them to speak.  I threw Smartboard pens in the air in frustration.  I even collapsed on the floor and groaned in agony.  Dramatic? Yes.  Was I trying to get a rise from them?  Certainly.  I yearned for a giggle, a laugh, a sigh, any response at all.  But it was always the same: deadbeat drum silence. 
 
If ya can't beat 'em, join 'em.

I put masking tape over my mouth to ensure my silence.  As the students entered the room, they gasped.  A few giggled.  A few pointed and could not close their gaping mouths.  They each received instructions, read them and followed task directives.  They tentatively moved around the room in partners, reading and gathering and analyzing information from text on the walls.  I pointed out leaders to lead the class discussion.  At first, they tried to look to me for approval, but my raised eyebrows and hand clapping urged them to do better than that: to think for themselves.  I shut myself up and laid the foundation, giving them no choice but to hammer and chisel, to build and bang their own way to the beat of their own drum.  I smiled under my masking tape and danced to ba-boom ba-boom.  At long last, new, fiery drumbeats.  "Yes," the world answered. "There you are.  I've been waiting for you."