The Art of Teaching Children, page 39
And then the most surprising thing happened. Suddenly, without thinking, my right hand rose and started to sign, “Hello. My name is Phil.” The woman smiled softly. Her whole countenance changed. With my fingers, I asked if there was anything I could do for her. She turned toward an empty glass on the bedside table. I pointed to it and signed, “Water?” She nodded. I left the room and fetched some from the nurses’ station. I returned and handed her the glass. Her eyes thanked me. When she finished drinking, I set the glass on the table. Then I signed good-bye and left.
In the hallway, I leaned against the wall and puzzled over what had just happened. My hands had not formed those letters in over thirty years! I had learned them in fifth grade when Mrs. Murayama taught the class how to sign the alphabet when we were learning about Helen Keller. Now, after all these years, I was able to use these letters to help a stranger in need. Amazing. Mrs. Murayama had touched the future. Decades later, she’d touched the life of a woman she never met. And unless I told her, she would never know.
Teachers rarely get to see the fruits of their labors. We usually have little contact with children after they leave our nests. It’s impossible to know our influence. That’s one of the mysteries of our work. But once in a while—if you’re lucky—you find out.
I was sitting at home in California when my landline rang.
“Hello,” I said into the phone.
A voice on the other end of the line piped, “Mr. Done, is that you?”
“Who’s this?”
“It’s András!”
András was ten. I had taught him the year before in Budapest. He was calling from Hungary.
“András? How did you get my number?”
“My mom had it.”
“Does she know you’re calling me?”
Pause. “Well… not really.”
I laughed. “Then we better keep this short.” This was before the time when calling international could be free. Surely it was costing a pretty penny. “Why are you calling?”
“I just wanted to say hi.”
“Well… hi!”
Now, let me tell you a little about András. As much as I loved this kid, András was one of the most challenging students I’d ever had. He sat right in front of me in class, stood close to me in line, and was seated two inches away from me at all of the assemblies. It seemed like every week we were out in the hallway working out a conflict. Once, when András was absent, it felt like half the class was gone. And yet, after all we had gone through together—look who was calling.
If you are a teacher, remember this: You are all Miss Greco and Mrs. Murayama. You are all Mr. Duncanson and Mr. Stretch. Behind each one of you are countless children whose minds you have broadened, whose character you helped shape, and whose lives, like András’s, you have touched. Ahead of you are many more. The passion, commitment, and warmth that you share with your students really do follow them for the rest of their lives. Be the teacher children remember fondly when they look back on their education. Be the teacher who comes into a child’s life but rarely.
The Challenges
The Back-to-School Blues
The beginning of summer break is always a happy time. You made it. By the end of June, you’re sleeping in, taking naps, and wearing flip-flops. Your bladder has settled into a new routine. But as summer progresses, things begin to shift. In July anxiety starts to edge its way in when you spot store clerks clearing aisles for back-to-school supplies and hanging banners of dancing rulers and smiling glue sticks. Too early. Actually, have you noticed that these banners never have teachers in them? There’s a reason for this: The teachers wouldn’t be smiling. Come August, your anxiety kicks into full gear. Everywhere you look—on TV, in store windows, online—you are reminded that school is just around the corner. By now, every other post on Facebook seems to be a meme with a crying teacher guzzling wine or a sexy shot of Jake Gyllenhaal or Leonardo DiCaprio purring, “Hey, girl, put your feet up. I’ll set your classroom up for you.” Come to think of it, a teacher’s summer fun resembles the bell-shaped story arc with the rising and falling action that we teach our students. A teacher’s fun rises in June, peaks in July, and tumbles in August. When I shared this thought with a friend, he said it followed the same trajectory as his General Electric stock.
* * *
By mid-August, every teacher gets the back-to-school blues. These blues hit because you realize that your leisurely summer life is about to be turned upside down. You know that before long you’ll have to reset your alarm clock, break your seventy-five-plus-day streak of wearing shorts, brave rush-hour traffic, remember what day of the week it is, and put on real shoes again. You understand that soon you will be waking up to stacks of papers around your bed and drinking mugs of half-slurped cold coffee at work because you were too busy to drink it when it was hot. Male teachers’ necks start to swell up because they realize that shortly they will have to put on dress shirts and ties again. Female teachers lament that they have to go back to wearing a bra all day. The back-to-school blues kick in because you know that in a little while, you’ll be lugging fans into your classroom that you took from home because the only room in the school with AC is the office. (Usually people steal supplies from the office. In teaching, you steal things from home.) You are aware that in a short time, you’ll have to open your computer and see all the school email that you didn’t look at over the break, including the reminders to read the summer professional development book that you have yet to crack open. And you know that pretty soon you’ll need to try recalling all the school usernames and passwords that the guys in the tech department recommended, and they look like this: #3@156&%4!
One reason teachers get the back-to-school blues is because they know that during that first week before the kids arrive, they won’t be able to do what they want to do. Teachers want to be in their classrooms the first week back, but they can’t. That week is always packed with meetings and professional development and first aid courses where you have to watch videos with bad actors performing CPR, then get down on the floor to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a plastic dummy. During all the meetings, you pretend to type notes on your laptop, but, really, you are making your to-do lists. If you could read the thought bubbles above your colleagues’ heads, they would be full of exclamation marks, question marks, and swear words.
For many teachers, the worst part of that teacher workweek is the icebreakers. I’m not a party pooper, and I like to have fun, but that first week back, I did not want to walk around the room with a sticky note on my back while I asked other people questions so that I could guess what my sticky note said. I didn’t want to make a long line with my colleagues in the order of our birthdays—without talking. I did not want to form two speed-dating circles where I had one minute to talk about my summer before moving on to my next “date.” Teachers have other things to do! Jill felt the same as I did, but she had an exit strategy. As soon as anyone began an icebreaker, she’d start fake coughing, leave the room, and hide out in the bathroom till it was over. Smart.
Around the time that teachers start coming down with the back-to-school blues, they also begin experiencing back-to-school nightmares. These bad dreams are the brain’s way of reminding you that the new school year is approaching. They typically fall into five categories: (1) Being unprepared; (2) Losing your students; (3) Running late; (4) Losing control of your class; and (5) Arriving at school in your PJs when it’s not Pajama Day. I once had a student teacher tell me that she had the pajama dream. “Congratulations!” I said. “You’re a teacher now.”
Every August, like clockwork, I would get teacher nightmares. One morning I woke up in a fright after dreaming that it was the first day of school, and I hadn’t unpacked a thing. Another time I bolted up in bed after having a dream that my third graders were going through my desk and found bottles of whisky. In one recurring dream, I was transferred to a new school with no notice to teach Italian to an auditorium full of eight-year-olds. I don’t speak Italian. And, once, I flew out of my bed panicked that I was late for school and raced to get dressed—until it dawned on me that it was Saturday. In July.
Teachers deal with the back-to-school blues differently. Lucy says she tries not to think about it. Audrey shops for new clothes. Dana hides anything that has to do with school in her garage, so that she doesn’t have to look at it. Once, my friend Mike put a plastic Halloween tombstone on his front porch at the end of August. Under the RIP, he wrote: “Summer Vacation.” Jill always gets a really bad case of them. One year I had a couple of teachers over a few days before it was time to report back. When I asked Jill what kind of wine she wanted, she gave a heavy sigh, flopped her head onto the counter, and cried, “What goes best with back to school?”
Teacher Heart
Doesn’t he have a coat? I wondered as I watched Devin, one of my third graders, on the playground. The weather had turned cold. All the other children were wearing coats and jackets now, but not Devin. He wore only a hoodie to school, and it wasn’t enough. Huddled in my own coat and scarf, I called him over.
“Aren’t you cold in just that hoodie?” I asked.
“Nope,” he answered.
“Do you have a coat?” I said casually. I didn’t want to make a big deal of it.
“I don’t need one.”
But I didn’t believe him. I knew Devin’s family was struggling financially. I spoke with the school counselor about it, and together we went to the PTA closet, where they kept donated clothes. We found a coat for Devin: navy blue with a removable plaid liner. It looked like it hadn’t been worn much. The counselor called Devin’s mom and asked if we could give it to him. She was grateful.
The next day, I called Devin into the classroom during recess and said I had a present for him. When I pulled the coat out from under my desk, his face lit up. “For me?” he asked. “Yes.” Devin put on the coat and rubbed his hand over it as I rolled up the cuffs. The coat was too big for him, but he didn’t mind. After he was buttoned up, he ran back out to recess. Seconds after he left, the door swung open, and Devin’s head poked around the corner. “Thanks!” he said, and he was off.
When the class came back in, and the children hung their coats and jackets in their cubbies, Devin kept his on. I called the kids to the carpet for a story, and Devin sat down beside me like he usually did. With his hands in both pockets, he hugged himself and said, “It’s so warm.”
* * *
Teachers are witnesses to society. In our classrooms, we see poverty and neglect, depression and anxiety, sadness and pain. We work with students who are exposed to domestic and neighborhood violence, whose parents have lost their jobs or been incarcerated, and whose families have lost their homes. We teach kids who come to school dirty, hungry, or sick because no one is at home to take care of them. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than half of US children have experienced some kind of trauma in the form of abuse, neglect, violence, or challenging household circumstances. That means that out of the approximately seventy-five million kids in the United States, more than thirty-seven million of them have experienced trauma. And they bring it with them to the classroom. Heavy backpacks aren’t the only loads children carry to school.
Teachers learn about some of the trauma, but most we don’t. We don’t hear about the drug busts or fights or drunken rants witnessed by our students at home. Most of the time, kids don’t tell their teachers that they saw their dad in handcuffs, that a grandparent has cancer, or that they’re not eating lunch at school because their mom owes the cafeteria money. A child doesn’t bring up that his older brother got kicked out of the house and got caught living in a storage unit, or that her family is living in a run-down motel now because the apartment was too expensive. A student doesn’t volunteer that he had to sell his bicycle. The truth is that most children don’t reveal their hurt and fear and sadness. Most put on brave faces. Sometimes kids who have been traumatized will misbehave or act defiant. More often than not, there is a story behind the misbehavior. And that story will oftentimes break your heart.
The trauma our students carry takes an emotional toll on teachers as well. Some call it the cost of caring. A friend of mine had a fifth grader who started crying when she found out it was a three-day weekend. She didn’t want to be home that long. It was then that my friend realized that school is a safe place for those children who have a difficult life outside of it. I remember when a first grader named Savannah ran up to me at recess to show me her dress. She’d just gotten it for the winter concert. I knew the school had bought it for her. Savannah said it was her first new dress. “And,” she said proudly, “we got one of those triangle things for it.” For a second, I didn’t know what she was talking about. When I realized what she meant, my heart clenched. She had gotten a hanger.
Teachers are first responders. When we learn that children have endured trauma or we suspect it, we do all we can to help. We keep our eyes on these kids and check in. We let them know that we are there for them if they want to talk. If necessary, we cut these students some slack because we understand that brains in pain have difficulty learning. Teachers build support teams and provide extra TLC. We keep granola bars, crackers, and juice boxes in our classroom cupboards for kids who are hungry and set up spaces that are warm and peaceful so that children can feel safe. We maintain consistent schedules and routines because these things give children a sense of security, and we create room environments that are orderly because we know that they bring comfort to children whose lives are not. We are calm, gentle, and refrain from raising our voices. In a world that is not always kind to our students, we show them that we will be. We do this because our teacher hearts won’t let us do anything else.
When hundreds of thousands of children were displaced from their schools during the Hurricane Katrina disaster that struck the Gulf Coast, teachers from California to Florida welcomed these students with open arms. All across the country, we added desks and chairs to our already full classrooms to take in Katrina’s kids. As they entered their new schools, we hung signs saying “Welcome!” and handed out school T-shirts and stuffed mascots because we knew that getting these children back to school was a vital step in supporting their emotional recovery. At recess time, we turned jump ropes, pushed swings, and sat with our new students because we recognized that we played an important role in creating stability. During class, we encouraged these kids to tell their stories because we understood that sharing them brings healing and builds bridges to those who listen. We gathered these children close to us on the carpet and read The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Harold and the Purple Crayon and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs because these stories are familiar, and familiarity brings comfort. Long after the special reports about the hurricane ended on the news, we continued to fill backpacks after school for the Red Cross and make change at bake sales for Katrina relief. In doing so, we were teaching our students what compassion looks like.
Years later, when the Covid-19 pandemic threw schools everywhere into a crisis, those teacher hearts kicked into high gear once again. All across the country—all over the world—teachers scrambled, oftentimes with little notice, to switch to distance learning. Harnessing new technologies, they shouldered the impossible task of replicating school from their homes. Suddenly millions of teachers transformed their kitchens and dining rooms and home offices into classrooms, where they put up bulletin boards, hung student art, and set up whiteboards on which they wrote messages that said “Your teacher misses you so much!” From these new classrooms, teachers Zoomed, emailed, chatted, and got dizzy when virtual first graders ran around carrying their Chromebooks with their cameras on. Teaching changed overnight.
During the pandemic, many teachers went the extra mile. Some of those miles became marathons. When schools closed, teachers dropped off packets of materials on doorsteps, read virtual bedtime stories (pets and stuffed animals encouraged), held online sing-alongs, and handed out tablets from school parking lots with the usernames and passwords already set up to make everything easier. They delivered Citizen of the Month and birthday certificates so they wouldn’t be missed. When giving lessons from home, teachers wore silly hairdos and hats on virtual dress-up days because the ones at school had been canceled. They didn’t skip wearing costumes for Halloween either, teaching in front of screens dressed as book characters and school supplies and Teenage Mutant Ninja Teachers. A couple of teachers I know sent out Flat Stanley–like drawings of themselves so that their students would have their teacher with them as they worked at home. One teacher friend told her second graders that she was going to take a day off on Friday and that a surprise guest would be teaching the class. Come Friday, the online class started, and there she was disguised as her grandma, complete with a gray wig, thick glasses, and pearls. The kids loved it, and “Grandma” returned the following week. If children didn’t understand something in their virtual classrooms, some teachers jumped into their cars, drove to their students’ homes, and taught lessons from sidewalks, driveways, front lawns, and porches. When the school day was over, many teachers stayed online to assist children needing extra help. A friend of mine who teaches grade four did just that with one of her boys. When she finished teaching, the child asked her if she would stay with him while he worked. He just wanted someone to be with. She stayed.
During the lockdowns, millions of those teacher hearts were heavy. Teachers missed being with their students. They missed their kids’ laughter and silly answers and quirkiness. They missed their thousands of questions. Teachers missed the loud hallways before school and at the end of the day. They missed watching their kids learn and grow. They missed turning the pages of a book together. Heck, one teacher I know said she even missed cafeteria duty. Teachers wished they could reach through the computer and help their kids. Distance learning just wasn’t the same. Teachers longed to get back.
