Reading Haiku While Trying to Homeschool

Marie Matsuki Mockett has an article on how homeschooling brought her back to the poetry of Basho. It begins as follows:

By late February of this year, the virus had made me sufficiently nervous that I began packing to leave San Francisco. I wanted to go to my family home on the coast of California where I had grown up. It was isolated and my parents had always kept a pantry stuffed with dry goods, plenty of toilet paper, and two freezers filled with food in the garage. This semi-survivalist attitude had seemed an extreme and eccentric way to live when I was a child; now it seemed like we had reached the dreaded moment for which they were always preparing. As soon as my son and I arrived, I began to prepare the garden, planting the seeds my mother had left in the pantry before I had abruptly moved her into a nursing home in December. Then I turned my attention to homeschooling.

In school, my son, Ewan, had been instructed in something called new math, which was supposed to make him feel like he understood the process of mathematics—the “narrative.” Suddenly acting as his teacher, I found his math sloppy. I felt something awful gestating inside of me: a latent tiger mom enraged that her son could not quickly multiply numbers. I could and would fix math. I was irritated, too, that his writing was full of run-on sentences. I began teaching him conjunctions, and his sentences became fluent fairly quickly. And what should we read? I dug out my old copy of Tom Sawyer.

“He is not a nice boy,” my son observed rightly after Tom had beaten up Sid. “I’m afraid if we keep reading, a cat might get hurt.”

I had been teaching my own class of M.F.A. students over Zoom, using the books I had brought with me. That week we were reading poems by the Japanese haiku master Basho, translated by Jane Reichhold. I put away laddish Tom Sawyer, and opened up Basho, on a whim. Here is his second poem.

The moon a sign, this way, sir, to enter, a traveler’s inn.

 Read the whole article here. Hattip to lithub, again.