It’s been a minute since I’ve written anything, so I’m just
going to savor the fact that I have something real to write about this evening.
I am a teacher. And in my 7 ½ years of teaching, I’ve had
handfuls of people ask me, “Why are you a teacher? You could be doing something
else! You could make SO much more money! Don’t you wish you had gone to law school?
It’s never too late! Yours is a thankless job!”
We sure do feel that way sometimes, so I can’t pretend that
it’s always gratifying work or that I HATE the idea of summers off. Some days
are really hard. REALLY HARD. I’ve been thrown into walls breaking up fights.
Parents have yelled me at because I refused to change a grade when their kid
failed my class and couldn’t play a sport. I’ve worked countless hours way past
the end of the school day grading, calling parents, and missing out on plans
with friends because I had to work. I’ve gotten rotten evaluations and had my
ass handed to me by bosses. I’ve watched students get moved around, drop out,
and attended some funerals. So, yeah. At the end of the day, it can really be
hard to rationalize why I’m still doing this with my life.
But I’ve also had some really moving, compelling reasons to
believe that I’m doing the job I was always meant to do. I’ve had former
students write to me and tell me that they still use the writing methods I
taught them in their college writing class. I’ve had students come back to
visit me and tell me that they got into medical school and law school or that
they… want to become a teacher. When a kid gets pulled aside and I’ve been able
to tell them that I found a book just for them, their face lights up and they
find me a week later, and we make a date to sit down and talk about the book.
Once, a former class of students called me to speak at a graduation ceremony.
So of course there are reasons to stay that can’t be put to a pen and paper.
But tonight I had a pretty uplifting moment that made me
turn a corner in my teaching career.
Today I was at school for 12 hours. I taught for 5 periods,
gave a tour to some school visitors, had a meeting after school with the other
department chairs, and then went into two hours of parent-teacher conferences.
Somewhere in there I think I peed, but I can’t be sure.
Parent-teacher conferences in New York City are so surreal.
Think of it like (what I imagine to be) speed dating. You set a timer and have
parents come through who desire to hear one of two things: 1.) Everything their
kid does well. 2.) Everything their kid is failing at. I’ve seen some really
hard conversations take place right in front of me, and since you never know
what home is like and the pressures that exist on the other side, you have to
be extremely careful with your words. Tonight I saw all of the above, so I
wasn’t too surprised; it was business as usual. But then the last parent came
in to talk.
This parent is extremely active in our school community, and
her son is really bright, so I’m sure she’s used to having similar
conversations with all of his teachers (probably since before he could talk).
But the thing is, we didn’t talk about her son’s academic success or failures.
I actually derailed the conversation because I thought it was important for her
to know what her eleven year old has done in my class and demonstrated to his
peers.
We’ll call this little boy John. John can pretty much blaze
through my work. He doesn’t
have a ton of friends his age, but he is getting there this year. I suppose he
could be fostering those friendships and working toward teenage rebellion by
making my life super tough and challenging everything I say, but he chose to go
in a different direction. John is in a class that has kids with extra
educational needs, and in his class is a boy named Sam. Sam has serious
learning disabilities. He isn’t very verbal. He struggles with vision
impairment and long-term memory retention. He even has a few anger issues in
there, which makes it really challenging on some days to even get him to wear his
glasses. (He hides them from me- it’s a really fun game we play… EVERY DAY.
Apparently this never gets old [for one of us].)
A few weeks ago, John pulled me aside and said, “I think I’d
like to work with Sam.” I told him I thought that was a really kind offer, but
that I didn’t want him to feed him answers or take away instructional time from
his own learning. He assured me that wouldn’t be the case and that we should
just “try it out”. John even said, “Ms.
Son, I don’t even mind when Sam picks his nose or blows spit bubbles, but
everyone else is going to lose it, so… how about we work together and see where
it goes?”
Now, I really thought that after three or four days of this
John was going to get fed up and ask to be moved back to his original group. But
what I’ve seen since then has really rocked my world. Every day John and Sam
walk into the classroom together. They get started on the Think and Answer and
work together to come up with solutions. When the questions get harder, John
tries to break them down for Sam or work on a different approach. They even
started reading the mentor text together and take turns reading out loud (for a
verbally-limited child this is huge). I’ve watched John share his lunch with
this kid, talk about video games with Sam, and make sure to include him in as
much as possible (both in and out of the classroom). Not many kids talk to Sam.
He’s not an easy kid to have a conversation with, and when they do talk to him,
it’s pretty limited and based around causing trouble. And John, although he is
bright and VERY verbal, likes some things that his peers aren’t into. He likes
magic and chess. He’s super into history. Last year he came to the library and
wanted everything I had on WWII… as a 6th grader. So needless to
say, they are an interesting duo.
Tonight when John’s mother came to parent-teacher
conferences, she was the last parent to walk through my door. It was past our
end time, and I was exhausted, but I was happy to see her. We didn’t even get
to the “school” part of the conversation because I had to let her know that
watching her son reach out to another human being who is so desperately lost
and isolated most of the time has been one of the greatest privileges I have
experienced in my time as a teacher. John gains nothing tangible from helping
and befriending Sam. But to watch them together… you would think you were
watching a bird and a fish forge a really magical collaboration that is SOMEHOW
working. I told her that the point at which I knew I had to say something was
when I noticed some magic cards that Sam had out in the hallway before school
one morning. He told me that John had given them to him. Then I watched him
carefully scoop them together, stack them perfectly, put them back in their
case, and cling to them as if they were gold. I asked John about it. He said,
“You know, Ms. Son… I just get the impression that Sam doesn’t get a lot of
treats. I thought… he could use something nice.”
When I told John’s mother, she started crying. And then I
started crying. Pretty soon my principal came in to kick us out of the building
and quickly turned around when she saw all of the feelings that had just
exploded all over my classroom.
John’s mother told me that we (his teachers) are constantly
modeling compassion and empathy that is pouring onto her child, and for that
she couldn’t repay us. Her kid can learn most of what I teach him one time
through or read extensively about any genre I give him on his own time. But
compassion and empathy are taught through demonstration, so on that front I’d
like to think that she’s right; that we have played some small part in that
when she leaves her child with us every day, five days a week. But it’s all of
us. We all do this. Maybe as teachers it comes naturally because it’s in our
job description to care and attend to 30 humans at one time…but I think it’s
more than that. Giving up your lunch period to tutor or making sure a kid isn’t
hungry is part of what we do when we think no one is looking, but it turns
out…someone is. They just happen to be 11 years old.
