The poetic reunion that brought Ocasio-Cortez’s second-grade teacher to tears

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“Ms. Jacobs! Is that you?!” the Democratic lawmaker replied. “You prepared me perfectly for this moment.”

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Mai Jacobs tried to instill a love of poetry in all her students, handing out photocopies every week for even the quietest kids to recite and hoping that someday they would hear a poem and think, “I remember second grade.”One of her second-grade students grew up to be U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and on Wednesday, Jacobs couldn’t help chiming in when the liberal political icon tweeted a poem by Benjamin E. Mays.

“I only have a minute. Sixty seconds in it,” began the poem, Ocasio-Cortez’s response to the news that she would have just 60 seconds to speak at the Democratic National Convention next week, in what many saw as a snub. “Forced upon me, I did not choose it, But I know that I must use it.

“It’s been such an emotional summer,” Jacobs told The Washington Post, saying she’s been feeling exhausted and “completely unheard” amid the mounting pressure for teachers to return to classrooms during thepandemic. Now, the fan of Shel Silverstein and “Jabberwocky” thought back to all the ways she had worked to incorporate poetry into her kids’ days, holding annual celebrations of the form and compiling anthologies of the work they wrote and read.

Jacobs, who declined to say where she now teaches, said she did not immediately recognize her old student rising to stardom. She was on a writing retreat in Ireland, she recalled, when Ocasio-Cortez shocked much of the political world and became a national figure by ousting 10-term incumbent Joseph Crowley in the 2018 Democratic primary for her district in New York.

She says she even tried calling the congresswoman, leaving multiple messages with aides about how excited she was to see what “Sandy” had done with her life.Her viral moment came as school staff are being thrust into stress and uncertainty, struggling with the challenges of shifting learning online or the fears of heading back to

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