by Fitz | Mar 25, 2026 | Essays, Journal, Teaching
I have been teaching, writing, playing and performing for over thirty-five years, while during these last ten years I have been given the time and space and support (and funds) to create a classroom and pedagogy that through stops and starts and a deliberate evolution of ideas and practices has come to be known simply as “Fitz English.” I have always been somewhat of a traditionalist in my approach to what I teach, but I have always been driven to improve the classroom experience in a way that empowers students to become more confident, fluent, and engaged readers and writers; moreover, I have never “clung to my ways” or to any ways for that matter! When something worked, I tried to make it better. When something did not work, it went into my overflowing bin of teacher trash–and a mighty big bin it is.
I can only thank my students and an enlightened and indulgent administration for placing a sacred trust in my hands–for the learning and practice of effective and powerful writing and reading skills is a sacred trust, and a duty that any wise teacher lives through in every class he or she teaches. The seven guiding principles of The Crafted Word are the product of my own education in the hardscrabble reality of the classroom. The seven pillars: Read, Write, Create, Share, Collaborate, Assess, and Reflect capture the essence of what it takes to enable a more profound and enriching experience of a sustainable and dynamic literary life.
I try to give my students whatever they need to flourish in their next academic year; however, I try even harder to build a foundation and approach to reading, writing and content creation that will serve and guide them throughout the odyssey of each of their respective lives. For a new person entering my classroom, the most noticeable feature of my classroom is what is missing–desks! There are no desks. There is, however, a large round table around which students can stand or sit on stools (not chairs). It is at this table where we meet to discuss the coming class period, to share the work we have completed, and to prepare for the coming project–and there is always a project to undertake. There is a large library of books arrayed along one wall surrounded by comfortable chairs. There are a few computers set on a standing bar; there is a widescreen TV on one wall. There is a stage set up with a green screen and mics and lights; there are two alcoves set up as recording studios–but there is no pencil sharpener; there are no reams of paper on a shelf; there are no blackboards or whiteboards, or posters hung on the walls–only guitars and banjos and framed artworks. There is–and there has not been–any paper shared between myself and my students for over ten years. Paper is simply not needed and, for me at least, is simply an inefficient hindrance to the work we do.
For many teachers, my classroom seems like an anathema. The lack of paper seems foolish and unwise. The distractions of technology mixed with students plopped upside down and sideways on the floor and across the arms of comfortable chairs is more than they can handle. Few teachers are jealous of my room, yet I guard it jealously–though I am very eager and willing to share it (and the secrets it holds)–freely and openly. There is a great fear that real teaching and real learning cannot happen in a room where motion, action, and relaxation intermingle–where sitting takes a distant second to standing, where reading and writing on iPads, tablets–and even phones–is encouraged, where every essay is turned into a video, podcast, where a blog post is recreated in a multi-media portfolio, and where everything is shared with each other, oftentimes created with each other, and always respected by each other.
If I sound like I am crowing like a rooster at dawn, I am; and I will keep on crowing until one of my students says, “This is too easy,” “I’m not learning anything,” or “You really should get another job.” I will keep on crowing until a parent can sincerely say, “My child did not learn enough or write enough,” “Where is the rigor or basic skills my child needs?” or “What a waste of a year my child had in your class.” If I have not crowed so loudly as to turn you away, keep scrolling and let me show you what I mean and how this approach can work in any classroom. I have the gift of a well-created classroom, but the essence of what I am trying to do could be accomplished in my backyard in a circle of pumpkins.
by Fitz | Mar 28, 2022 | Essays, Journal
Good intentions are easily hobbled by inaction. There has always been a murky and muddied No Mans Land in every war where the evil and the righteous trade the moral high ground. This is not the case in Ukraine. Putin’s actions are evil–pure, unmitigated, unprovoked evil. To argue otherwise is to be complicit in cowardice. History will, no doubt, soon be the arbiter of this perpetration of the lion against the mouse. In the looming carpet bombing of a sovereign democracy by Russian forces, our trepidation outweighs our bravery. The phrase “brave Ukrainian soldier” will soon be etched on untold thousands of gravestones, alongside thousands of other headstones of woman, children, elderly and infirm–all of whom could not or would not leave their homes, cities, towns and villages.
All the while we wait to see if our sanctions have any teeth sharp enough to pierce the the thick fur of a savage beast run amok in a caged corner of a burning world. We wait to see if sanity overcomes the insane. We wait to see if our daunting weapons will ferret some unscathed pipeline to soldiers fiercely standing and defending the rubbled ground of their battered homeland. We wait, and secretly hope, the Ukrainians will see a light larger than the exploding bombs, missiles and tank shells utterly destroying their land and quietly capitulate and save what they can. Are they too blinded by patriotism to sense the inevitable genocide unleashed upon them? Are they really ready to sacrifice their children, mothers, fathers in a stubborn will of defiance?
They are. We are not.
We are afraid of Putin. We are literally shaking in the comforts of our fine homes, schools and communities at the very sight of his myopic visage on the screen. He is a crazed psychopath with a finger on a nuclear arsenal, so we rattle our feeble sabers and dangle whatever carrot we can find. The carnage in Ukraine is a distressing show, but there is no blood on our screens, no marrow spilled at our footsteps, and no conviction in our eulogies for the innocents killed in a land so far away. We wait for the next chapter to be written for us, not by us. I count myself among this enfeebled slice of humanity, and it shames me. It shames me that I simply want this war to end. It shames me that my only palpable response is this stream of righteous drivel. It shames me to sit in this chair and sip my coffee and contemplate raking the yard. My cowardice bleats softly: “I just don’t want and cannot fathom a World War III. Please stop.”
But it is World War III, and we are about to lose the first battle.
by Fitz | Jun 26, 2020 | Essays, Journal, Teaching
Words matter. Words carefully crafted and artfully expressed matter infinitely more. There is something compelling in a turn of phrase well-timed, arresting image juxtaposed on arresting images; broad ideas distilled into clear, lucid singular thought. For the writer, it is empowering to know that his or her words have the capacity to engage and effect change, to alter perceptions and persuade a living audience–not merely to share stale thoughts and shallow opinions, but to articulate what needs to be said in a wall of words that will stand the test of time and speak powerfully to the present generation and inspire succeeding generations.
Words… these damn words clabbered together–they are our gift to eternity. Learn how to use words; learn how to craft them together, and learn how to live the life of a writer. If you want to be a writer, live the life of a writer. It really is that simple: if you want to be a writer, live like a writer. Read. Write. Create. Share. Don’t push a loaded cart up a slaggy hill. Let the engine pulls the train. Learn the craft and the art will follow. You don’t have to be the drunk stumbling down a dark road howling inanities in the night, but even that is better than not howling at all. Howling is the birth before the epiphany, but after the primal howling in the dark, after the grimacing at fate, give the time and the space needed to till, plant and sow a more perfect garden with the seeds of your original cowlings. Nurture that garden as a farmer of words and bring your fruit to the market. It may well that your basket comes home more full than sold, but you are now the farmer of your mind and soul and heart and being, not the hungry pauper trying to fill a crumbling sack, scrounging for cheap seconds at before the shutters of commerce are drawn.
“A stitch in time saves nine,” or so the old adage goes, because a writer is a weaver of tapestries. Everything we write is a new mosaic of woven cloth–an original expression of who, what, when, where and why we are at any given point in our fleeting existence. We are not born weavers, but all of us have some rudimentary concept of a needle pulling thread. We understand the process. Every time we speak, we are stitching something together, weaving together words, struggling to hold together a wretched pattern of thoughts into a coherent conversation worth having; however, our opinions too soon fray and are soon too tattered to wear and are equally too soon forgotten.
But not so for the writer. The true writer goes back to that tattered, convoluted and forgettable conversation–an interplay of words sown, no doubt, with strong seed on thin topsoil where even the heartiest of intent withers on a dry vine. True writer do not give up on possibility; they go back and rebuild those same words and thoughts into a more perfect and palpable tapestry–a living and breathing garden of mind-swollen and succulent fruits worth bringing to market. What starts as a rambling in a journal evolves into something that resembles clarity and, ultimately, something worth sharing. It does not, however, just happen because we want it to happen. It happens because we make it happen. It happens because we learn to weave and stitch, and we learn to till and plant and cull the good from the bad.
The recipe for success is as old as time: learn, practice and persist. As a teacher of writing and as a writer, I am simply one of many pointing my finger at the moon. Your journey is uniquely your own. If you are not thirsty, then every well is the same. But if you are thirsty, go to the deepest, purest well and drink deeply until you are filled or have sucked it dry. To live the life of a writer is to live with an unquenchable thirst for that purity of thought etched upon a page of time. Your journey to the moon itself is distant and dangerous, and even the moon has only a reflected light, but everything you write serve as waypoints to map your journey–these linear dots arcing across the universe prove you have escaped the lure of gravity and the myopic confines of the muddy orb of earth.
That journey proves proves you are a writer–that you have not chosen the easy path with words, but the path of the explorer, the weaver and the farmer…
And that is always worth it in the end.
by Fitz | Jul 25, 2019 | Essays, Journal
I clabber down the old tote road towards the red pine forest, leaning on my staff, skirting boulder-strewn ruts and small gullies carved out by two days of heavy rain. It is only a mile or so from our cabin, still, my wife makes me wear a pouch with an iPhone and an epi-pen. I once poked a yellow jacket nest with the stub of my staff and had to run like an enraged bear through the mad tangles of this New Hampshire forest.
I am wiser now.
I don’t know why I am drawn to this daily amble. There is nothing special here: miles of mossy stone walls slowly sinking under the detritus—a hundred years or more of leaf, moss and deadwood, edging what once were fields, overtaken now by massive white pine, ashes weakened by blight, red oaks and sugar maples; The floor is an impenetrable bramble of gnarly bush, ferns and bog. Here and there are old foundations, small and square, meticulously laid, dug into scrabbly hillsides, yet, somehow, hardy, cursing men lived in the rough cabins and spent their days cutting timber, carving fields out of impossible ground, wrestling massive granite stones to set the lines between them.
My epi-pen and phone hang on me like effete sophistry. I do not even recognize what bird is calling whom? Certainly not me—this morning intruder stopping by the great swamp. I scan the shores for moose. I know they are there, along with black bear, bobcats and deer, fisher cats, skunks and raccoons. It is a fool’s errand to think they would reveal what they know or where they lie at daybreak.
They, too, must have their walls.
The deer flies attack me like I am their last supper, but I learned long ago to dress for a summer hike as if it is mid-winter: heavy boots, gloves, denim—a shroud of mosquito mesh covering my head, tucked deliberately into my sweaty breast. They do not bother me, incessant as they are, any more than any other swatch of warm flesh breathing slowly in this still morning air, lingering with low fog.
If not for these flies I would have to share this trail with gobs of humanity bent on an easier hike. They will come in the fall when the weather is cool and mad dashes of color are ripped from the trees and soften this worn trail.
I only once met another hiker—an old woman with a willow basket and an old camp saw. She seemed unnerved to see me clothed in my normality and revealed in a wispish voice: “I am here to find some black birch to make my tea.” I offered her some extra mesh, but, “They do not bother me,” was all she said. A few steps later I looked back, and she was gone. The mystic in me saw some ancient Margaret searching for her illicit lover, Tamlin, in this lonely bower—but she probably just strode away faster than the flies could fly.
I’ve never seen her again.
At a certain point the tote road splits: to the left it cleaves around the massive swamp into which empties innumerable freshets, springs and small brooks, The springs of water that fill Black Pond—black as tea, steeped in a broth of bitter New England leaf.
To the right it arcs into a smaller trail that runs many miles inland into forgotten land. Another small trail wends three more miles to Trout Pond. Every day I remind myself to someday bushwhack that overgrown path, just so I can be one of the few who can say, “I have been there.”
But it is the Red Pine Forest that calls me. The vague entrance marked by a mossy boulder. I duck under arches of young beech, saplings that will never grow old in this forbidden place. The red pines are an odd anomaly, planted in straight lines by some dreamer plotting a handsome fortune In telephone poles—seemingly hundreds of piercingly straight spires interlaced by an equal number of deadened timber, holed by woodpeckers and jays—leaning and hanging, ominous widow-makers ravaged by wind and storms, who died trying. I sneak in as the sun is rising, bending under an arc of beech saplings into the mysterious grove. Like the immigrant red pines, I feel strangely out of place—as if I, too, am not welcome. I am Narcissus staring into his vain pool of water, drawn and entranced by fleeting, corporeal beauty, but unlike the red pines I am not trapped here, stoic to the last.
I watch the streams of light bolt in flashes of geometric entropy scanning the soft needled floor. I feel a murmur of wind and a cackling jay urging me quickly to leave. And so I clabber back home along the old tote road, coddled by deer flies, swarmed by mosquitoes, kindred to the moose and the old Finns of these woods, accepting there are things I may never know.
by Fitz | May 11, 2019 | Essays, Journal, Poetry, Teaching
I am You, and You are me…
Give a damn & figure it out
I feel like one of my students: it’s the night before my big presentation at All-school-meeting, and I still don’t know what I am going to talk about. I just know I am supposed to talk about me…
That’s pretty scary for me because, well, I’m me. At any given time I know myself too well, and at other times I’m like, who is this guy?
I’m the guy whose socks probably don’t match, and one of my socks is on onside out.
I’m the guy whose engine warning light in my van was probably on the whole way to school–and I never noticed.
I’m the guy who forgot to post an assignment on Fenn.org and his students are plotting a revolution and mass protest.
I’m the guy who tries to be a teacher–and so he is…
So, how does one start something like this?
I am John Fitzsimmons, and let me tell you about me…
(No–way to vain and presumptuous)
Hi, I’m Fitz, and I may be old, but I’m slow…
(No–you are not here to hear the truth)
Hi, I am Mr. Fitzsimmons, your new teacher: I just flew in from Chicago and boy my arms are tired…
(Nope… That was funny forty years ago)
Hi… so glad to be here: Last night I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out…
But if you know me, you have heard this all before…
I’m the kid who got grounded if I ever got a B for a grade… Because my mother would think I cheated…
I’m the kid who went to Peabody and Sanborn and CCHS and who warns all you going CCHS next year to wear thick-soled boots to school…so you don’t cut your feet on the broken hearts I left behind.
Not really, because I’m really the shy kid who spent an entire summer after 8th grade trying to find the courage to hold Megan Tassini’s hand–and I never did!
I’m the kid who spent entire dances lurking in the corner of the Hunt Gym fearing that Stairway to Heaven would start, and a whole night would have gone by–and I wouldn’t have asked a single girl to dance…
I’m the kid whose father spray painted his sister’s figure skates black and told me everyone would think they were hockey skates, and I’d walk home in the dark from Greenes Pond, down Plainfield Road to 38 Longfellow road, still wearing my black figure skates…
I lived in and on and through Greenes Pond, Whites Pond, Walden Pond, Warners Pond–The Concord River, The Assabet River, The Sudbury River. I was fish and fisherman, sailor and boat, landmark and explorer–all within this beautiful, precious, magnificent expanse of earth called Concord.
I was an ADD wonder child whose eyes could dart in a thousand directions in a single glance; whose head was built out of dreams; who made sunburned skin a living, breathing whirl and endless dance of motion and adventure…
I was you, and you are me, and our lives are inextricably linked in this adventure called life… We know that nothing gold can stay, so we breath in the best of each day and never let it out.
I was a wrestler and now a wrestling coach. The coach whose only wise words to a wrestler heading out on the mat against a Goliath of a monster–a skinny kid from Fenn facing certain annihilation–and I shrug and say, “do one good thing. Do one good thing and accept defeat with a smile, for you don’t learn anything much from winning, but you learn a lot by trying.”
I was a reluctant, timid student–and now I am a teacher. Go figure… Maybe that’s why I drive my students crazy with answers that are not really answers. I respond to simple questions with things like:
Get through it, get over it. Give a damn and figure it out. It’s your essay not mine. Make it as long as it should be and as short as you can… Give me a pebble and I’ll show you the universe; show me the universe and I’ll give you a pebble… It’s not where you go; it’s how you go… Good writers don’t always make good poets–but good poets always make for great writers…don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.
And that list goes on and on because a good question is better than a good answer.
The question I ask myself each day is “Who am I and what should I try to do?”
And that is why my life is shaped and formed, sculpted and forged out of the fire of my mind–a fire that is as bright and intense as it was when I was you–you who are probably dreaming and scheming of what is possible as soon as the old guy finishes his presentation and you can go off to recess.
After 61 years on this planet asking the same question, what then am I?
In short, I am a poet–and everything else are tentacles on the octopus that is my life. So I am also a folksinger, a songwriter, a tinkerer and a maker of meatballs. I’m a father to seven wild and unadorned children, and a husband to a beautiful and forbearing wife. I am everything I ever hoped I could be, and far short of where I still can be. I am you and you are me.
I love teaching, but I equally love the coming summer as much as any of you, for for summer gives me the time to live in the woods of a rustic summer camp in New Hampshire (and also Camp Sewataro in Sudbury were I first met and sang many of you); to swim, fish, sail and hike; to write in my beloved journal and to sing at campfires with piles of weathered, mosquito-bitten kids bunched like starfish on a beach, singing their heads off–even though, technically, starfish don’t have heads…
And so I will end this presentation of me–the immutable me–with the only gift I that is truly me and has never–as in ever–let me down–Song…
by Fitz | Feb 8, 2019 | Essays, Journal, Teaching
“But he hasn’t got anything on!” the whole town cried out at last.
The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, “This procession has got to go on.” So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.
~The Emperor’s New Clothes, Hans Christian Anderson
It’s kind of weird—and more than a bit arrogant—but I have this separate part of my journal where I keep all my entries that reflect some primitive sort of thoughtfulness and balance–scrabblings that might even represent and resemble honest and real wisdom. I came here to this “journal” because I just finished reading a school email noting that I am “required” to attend the diversity sessions during our winter professional day. I am thinking and hoping that if I put a response in my “Wisdom Journal,” some kind of nuanced and balanced thoughts will come out of it-—but, I doubt it. My stubborn nature will emerge; I will refuse to see the other side; [but then again, the other side will, no doubt, refuse to see mine] so I am left to dig my muddy yankee soles into the slippery ground of this new, emerging spring and battle the elements in another senseless battle of wits.
This is my intellectual dilemma: I simply am not interested in someone—someone not of my choosing—to introduce me to the world (especially his or her world) of affinity groups, gender identity and toxic masculinity. I am not disinterested in the subject, nor is it off the radar of my life; I just object to being forced to listen to a certain person or persons with whom I have no relationship or affinity at all, or, even worse, I know them and have no interest in their point of view, their personal perspectives, or their politicized point of views. I am a curmudgeon at heart; I distrust any self-proclaimed captain barking orders to go hard a’lee and sail unopposed and against my will and wisdom onto a rocky shoal of a sultry, emerging paradigm.
I am in essence being forced against my will to spend a day of my life immersed in a senseless sea of drivel and doggerel, and if I show my reluctance, I will be vilified and labeled a bigoted perpetuator of myopic thought and white privilege. My relatively simple job of teaching 8th and 9th grade English seems dependent on my agreeing to (or at least appearing to agree to) whatever is on the daily agenda of a middle school professional day presented by mid-level intellects empowered by some bandwagon thinking of superior virtue and noble action.
Where is Socrates when you really need him? Where are the colleagues who might agree with me? Who framed the scaffolding of this now urgent pedagogical priority? What, really, is the point? Has my life been so unexamined as to discard my past speculations of right and wrong? Is there some flaw in my life that needs mending? What have I done to deserve this magnanimous flogging? What seer sees so clearly into my soul, my motives, my ruminating and my urgency to curve the bent of my elusive genius and disrupt the path of my hard-wrought, existential narrative?
I hear the refrain that it is only a day—and a day I am paid well to endure. It is a chance to hear new voices, new ideas and new ways of understanding. If that is the case, how different is it from any other day? I am no dolt to conformity; I do not live to reassure my comfortable self. I box my own ears in a continual search for what is ineffably me! The very notion that I need more hands to bandy me about is insult to affront. I am the proverbial horse being dragged to water, yet I am not so thirsty as to drink the potion prepared for me. Find other mares and stallions to follow your mirage.
But, dammit, not me. Give me back the day. My soil is ill-suited to your seed. See clearly and put clothes on your vain emperor. Send me off to ponder and leave me alone.
At the end of the day, let us compare our respective fruits and see whose basket is full.
