The Curious Lament of a Former Second Grade Teacher

 

The timing was perfect.  I was 56 and looking toward retirement but not yet ready, either physically, emotionally, or monetarily.  I’d moved to Atlanta for a high-falutin job with the Georgia Department of Education, one that I soon realized I was nowhere near suited for.  I’d been toying with the idea of returning to teaching children before I retired but wasn’t sure how to navigate the complicated public-school teacher market in a city as large at Atlanta.

Long story short, I got a job teaching second-grade in a wonderful school in the ritzy Atlanta area known as Buckhead.  And it was love as soon as the little gap-toothed wonders walked in the door on that first day of school and that love grew throughout the year.   I loved their bed heads, their slurpy pre-brace gap expanders, their need to wear shorts in winter, their burgeoning senses of humor, self, and the rule of law, and their robust bravados.

Those second graders were a perfect balm to my empty nest and solitary lifestyle.  I laughed at them and they laughed at me and we laughed at ourselves.  I worried about them and became irritated by them, but loved them nonetheless.

AND THEY LOVED ME BACK!!!!  They thought I was funny and wise and could move small mountains (or at least the bookcase their pencil had somehow ended up behind ).  We had a great year and at the end of it, we were sad and some of us cried because there would never be a year like this one and no teacher could ever love her students like I did and my students were going to be so sad next year away from me.  I felt a bit sorry for their new teachers who would certainly pale in comparison to me.

Then came summer break and a whole new class.  I loved them too and they loved me back, and my last-year students still loved me and they would stop by my door when they could to tell me how much they missed me and that third grade just wasn't as good as second grade.

That lasted about a month.

True, my new students thought I was great and I thought the same about them, but my last year students weren’t coming by as often and, when they did, they no longer looked quite so sad.  In fact, they looked alarmingly happy.

And it got worse.  As the years wore on and that first class became older and with bigger feet and straight teeth, the more they seemed to treat me like a somewhat embarrassing aunt.  Like they were afraid I might want to pinch them on the cheek and talk about how much they’d grown.  They were always polite and sometimes warm but with an air of being late for an important appointment.  And when I WAS able to truly engage them they didn't seem to recall our best jokes or our most memorable times.  

I've gotten over it.  I'm fine.  Those students in my first post-menopausal class are now college Freshmen.

I wonder if I should warn their English 101 professors.

Birthday Girl

 Dear Molly,

If I were with you this morning, I’d make blueberry muffins from a mix and I’d put a birthday candle in yours, worrying as always that the melting candle just might be carcinogenic, one of many reasons why there wouldn’t be twenty-eight of them. 

People told me a late-in-life child would keep me young.  I’m not sure if that was true for me with you, but you have certainly kept me going, sometimes from worry, sometimes from necessity, often from your sheer Mollyness, your quirkiness, your dark and dorky humor, your carnsarned cussedness.

Through your more than a modicum of spills and struggles, you’ve managed to come to an understanding of yourself and others that I think is unusual for someone as young as you.  Although you don’t always trust enough to share this quiet discernment, at just the right moment, under the right circumstances, you offer up something so deep and insightful it leaves me slack jawed in wonderment.

People love you because you’ve been there, because you ask so little and offer so much: a sturdy shoulder, a big heart, a from-the-gut laugh, and a thoughtful answer to afraid-to-ask questions.   Your sense of irony comes from your sincere belief that, if it fell apart, it was because you didn't screw it on tight enough.  And, while that may not be all that healthy for you, it sure makes the rest of us relax a bit.  There’s such a comfort in world-worn you.

You worry that, at twenty-eight, you should be further ensconced in your adult life, more firmly rooted in knowing where you’re going and when.  I’m afraid I feel the same way at sixty-two, so I won’t be much help in figuring that out.  I do believe there’s a road map for your journey and an itinerary, both of which will come into your sight-line as you travel your life.  What a surprise that your heart’s own true love turned out to be with kids in high school, the very place that almost did you in.  Talk about courage, and perhaps a perverse form of payback.

You, my youngest child, share with me a love of reading.  In fact, you’re so pitiful and geeky that you profess the home-made Harry Potter coasters to be the best present you’ve ever received, and I’m pitiful and geeky enough to believe you.  We also now share a profession and a desire to pass on what little knowledge we have to anyone who will sit long enough to listen (and especially to those who won’t).  I’ll never forget that your first full-time teaching job came to you at the same moment I was leaving my final one.

The baton has been passed and the circle is unbroken.

Love always,

Mama

PS:  Some photos of times you may or may not remember

 And we didn't realize you needed glasses?

 Easter at Houston Lake

 Remember the naked years?

 The first of the "Maw" cruises

With your big brother

 With your big sister.

Reading most likely

 This must have been the Melissa and Billy booze cruise 

before they found the free liquor behind the closed bar.

Time

A message to the parents of my students this year:

Each morning as the sun first peeks into my classroom window and I prepare for the day, I stand at the board and write the date with an orange marker. I began this school year with Monday, August 9, 2010, and soon I’ll write Tuesday, May 24, 2011.

And that will be it.

Just as I’ll never again write those specific dates on that board in an orange marker on those particular days, neither will I ever again greet your child as my own as he or she arrives, wet-combed hair or bed head, lunch in hand or sorrowfully left in the back seat of the car, eagerly or reluctantly facing the morning, a story to tell, something to share.

We talk of good news and bad, new pets or those who’ve left us, family trips in our future or in our past, ballgames won or lost, times of trouble and times of bliss. We spar with jokes and insults; we forgive and sometimes forget; we argue and then offer ourselves for comfort.

Living with twenty or so children seven hours a day, five days a week, ten months a year is an experience much greater than a curriculum map or an attendance sheet or test scores or discipline plan. We become a family and what happens between the four walls of our classroom is as complicated and tender as what can be found in any home. We share our laughter and tears and pain and wonderment with each other a hundred times a day. We have a common language and agreed-upon jokes; specific memories that no one else on earth will ever have.

My second-graders will move on and love their third-grade teacher in spite of what they promise me now. They will never remember me as I remember them - they with their gappy teeth and shorts in winter and fake tattoos and fledgling understandings of who they are and what they’ll become.

Time is such a trickster. It hides itself in routine, in menial jobs to be done, in minor irritations that keep us from realizing we’re in the midst of something amazing. We become mired in the details and often lose track of the gift. I wish I could tie up this year in a ribbon and give it to myself when I need a lift, or to be reminded of what’s important; when I need a good laugh or an even better cry.

I’ll want to remember and to tuck it all away because this year has been as no other year. No other class was like this class and no other children were like these children. We were Mayo’s class and it will never be the same.

 

Many thanks to Nance at Mature Landscaping for this award

The Power of the Imperfect Teacher

When I returned to teaching children five years ago, my principal asked me if I thought I was a better teacher now than I’d been when I was younger. I told her no, that I was still pretty much the exact same teacher I was when I was thirty.

Aside from having some wisdom about children and how most of them turn out okay despite of our best interferences and also some amassed logical thought about how people actually learn, I do believe I'm basically the teacher I was years ago, one who was, and still is, incredibly imperfect and flawed.

And that, to my mature, long-view way of thinking, is a good thing.

In our American system, kids have an average of about twelve teachers through fifth grade, and then most likely a minimum of forty more from middle through high school. Just like everybody else, teachers come in all ages, shapes, sizes, colors, political leanings, and yes, sexual orientations. They also come with strengths and weaknesses and preferences and irritating habits and passions for things like kayaking or Sudoku or hairless cats.

Teachers also arrive with preferences and strengths and weaknesses when it comes to teaching itself. For example, my school has about fifty teachers. Some of those teachers are wonderful at creating a serene and ordered environment that makes kids feel safe and valued. Others are masters of planning and organization who never ever forget to teach a skill or a standard, or they are creative geniuses who think of new and interesting ways to make learning fun. Still others will travel all over Atlanta begging pizza parlors for boxes to use for fantastic projects. Then there are those who will stay late with a kid every afternoon until something sinks in, and one in particular who loves hands-on and minds-on learning to the point that he spends hundreds of dollars out of his own pocket each year so that his students have the games and manipulatives and learning materials they need for maximum understanding.

Although I do try to be the best teacher I can be, I’m not any of those people . I will never have the most well-behaved students or those with the prettiest handwriting. Very few of my kids will make perfect scores on achievement tests, nor will they walk in a perfect line to and from the lunchroom. What I do believe I’m good at is finding what each of my students is good at, whether that be drawing or telling a joke or being an excellent friend or break dancing or somersaulting while singing the Star Spangled Banner. I'm more interested in salvaging their little psyches than in molding their minds, I'm afraid. I, myself, am more heart than brain.  In addition, because my sense of what’s humorous arrested at about age eight, my second graders and I think the same things are extremely funny, something that, believe me, makes the grayest February day seem a bit more sunny.  

But it's not only our strengths that give the children we teach the gifts we have to offer; it's also our weaknesses and our crazy, not to mention irritating, foibles.  For example, I can't teach Science worth a darn so I have to get Starla, my scientific genius, to explain our solar system and the life cycle of a frog.  I also can't ever find anything so I need Katherine and Maddie to help me to organize myself.  Then there's the rest of my class who have to finish my sentences for me because I'm post menopausal and I've misplaced about 50% of my language synapses.  

However, my students are lucky to be learning that grown ups aren't always right and are, in fact, rather lame in some important areas, and that, I can tell you, is a learning worth learning for kids of all ages.

If teachers were electrically powered automatons or perfect humans, kids would lose out on so many things, like a grown up who will try to help them make a map of the world with macaroni no matter how incredibly stupid that idea is, or an adult who can't recall at just the right moment how many inches there are in a yard but will give the kid who can remember a high five and a very loud "thank you, Einstein!"

And the good thing is that, next year or maybe the next, my current students will get a teacher who loves Science or who truly believes that neatness counts or who sets firm rules they will learn to follow and believe in. And ultimately, all of the teachers those children have throughout time will help to give shape to the adults they will become, along with their own strengths and weaknesses and preferences and irritating habits and passions.

That, to my mind, is how it works.

The mother of one of my current students just sent me this email:

These children are making such strong friendships in your class.  You are making such lasting impressions on these young children.  They will remember you with love all their lives and will always have positive memories of second grade.  Thank you!

Notice she didn't mention anything about her child's improved handwriting or how well I taught our last Science Unit.  I'm afraid that praise will have to go to next year's teacher.

Certified

I just renewed my teaching certificate for the eighth time, which means I've had nine certificates, with this newest one being good through 2016, for a total of 45 years of teaching certification. In the state of Georgia, you must be certified in order to teach in all public schools and most of the private ones. A certificate is good for five years and, at the end of every five years, you have to renew it. The requirements for re-certification usually include evidence of staff development and that you haven’t done anything dastardly to a kid.

But this story isn’t so much about my teaching. It’s about my life. My nine certificates, so far, have spanned 40 years, my entire adult life, and thinking about each one takes me back.

My first certificate arrived in 1971, along with my 21st birthday, my college diploma, and my marriage license. I thought I would teach for a few years until my children came along, and then I would morph into a full-time mom, baking and ironing and donning high heels when hubby came home from work. I remember my mother telling me that I needed to have a college degree in case my husband died and I had to support myself. For that first year after we married, Gary was finishing up Pharmacy School at the University of Georgia and I taught first grade in Barrow County.

In 1976, I renewed my certificate for the first time. By then, Gary and I had moved to Greenville, South Carolina, where we'd had our first born, Melissa, and had then moved back to his home town of Warner Robins, Georgia because his father wasn’t doing well and his mother had just died. We couldn’t sell our house in Greenville, so we lived with Gary’s daddy for about six months. It was during that time that I became pregnant with Billy, which I remember as being a big surprise.  Now, I'm also a little surprised that I bothered to renew my certificate at all,  since what I was intent on at the time was birthing babies and decorating nurseries.  I do remember Gary looking at me in the grocery line one day and saying he didn't know how we were going to make it financially if I didn't go back to teaching.  That's about the time I realized the rules for women had changed from when my mother had given me her college-degree advice, and so I began to re-think my life plan.

My first day teaching after having kids.  Notice the open window.  It was late August with no air conditioning in the schools.

In 1981, during the time of my next renewal, I was teaching full time, I’d just finished my Master’s Degree, and I could tell that something had shifted in me. I was no longer a mother who happened to be a teacher. I was a professional woman who also happened to be a mother. That was also about the time I decided I wanted to go to law school, so I took the LSAT and did quite well, leading me to apply to law school at Mercer University. I was accepted but ultimately decided not to go. I didn’t really want to be a lawyer; I just wanted to have the opportunity to keep on going to school.

 This pretty much sums up my educational philosophy both then and now.

My son, Billy, was in this kindergarten class.

Five years later in 1986, I received my fourth certificate in the midst of working on my Specialist’s Degree and just before my third child’s second birthday. Molly had been a bit of a surprise when she'd arrived, but, although I was certainly happy to have her and loved her just as dearly as I loved the first two, her wonderfulness didn't stop me from my commitment to moving up within my profession.  She probably wouldn't have survived if Barbara, our neighbor, hadn't stepped in to be my much better suited stand-in.  Then, in 1987, I was offered my first out-of-classroom assignment, a job that had me traveling all over the state, training teachers in an early childhood program.  I was pretty full of myself by then and it was wearing on my marriage.

The professional woman juggling work, kids, Molly's blanket, and a cat.

By 1991 when  my fifth certificate arrived in the mail, I was in the midst of a divorce and a doctoral program.  I wasn't traveling as much with my job, but my degree quest had me engaging in a 240 mile round trip to the University of Georgia at least one evening a week.  In 1993, I became an elementary principal, a position I kept for five years.

In 1997, one year after I received my sixth certificate, I finished my Doctorate in Educational Leadership and started my quest to see what my next job would be.  The Dean of Education at Georgia Southwestern State University called and asked if I wanted to join the faculty there.  I did,  and so I left a job paying $80,000 a year for one paying about $52,000.  Although my life as a college professor was much less grueling than my life as a principal, the pay sucked and at some point I realized I'd educated myself into a much lower paying job.

Year 2001 brought an attack on America and my seventh certificate.  I was still at the college and enjoying it, but I worried that my relatively low salary would affect my retirement benefits, so I checked around to see if I could find a job with better pay.  That came with the Department of Education and a move to Atlanta in 2005.  I loved Atlanta but wasn't crazy about the job and what I really wanted was to teach children again before I hung up my professional hat..

By 2006, I had a new job teaching second graders in a wonderful school in Buckhead, which brought renewed meaning to my seventh renewal and my eighth certificate.  I'd come full circle and was back doing what I'd set out to do back in 1971.

So, here I am to now, with my ninth certificate, which came to me the same week as my 61st birthday.  For the first time, it wasn't mailed.  Instead, I had to download it from the Professional Standards Commission website before I could print it.  One of my young teacher friends seemed perplexed as to why I needed to print it at all since it was safely stored on the PSC website.  She didn't know about the other eight, safely kept in a drawer in my living room, evidence of a well-lived (or at least well-intended) life.

I've been contemplating retirement of late, but I'm now thinking I  might stay on a while longer since I still enjoy my job (most days). 

After all, I'm certified for five more years.

How could you not love working with people this size all day?

One Hundred Eighty Days

That’s how long we teachers get for a school year, give or take some days, depending on the weather and the political climate. When the education experts tell us we need more time with students, we gear up for that. When the politicians tell us we need to get it all done in less time, we try our best to do that.

This year, I had one hundred seventy six days with my twenty-two second graders. We had two weather days, one for a flood and one for snow. I missed a day when my granddaughter was born and another one for staff development. Each day was seven hours long. In those hours, we worked hard; we read, we wrote, we added and subtracted and began to understand what it means to multiply, we measured stuff and tried to figure out fractions and old fashioned clocks. We also learned some Georgia history, some geography, some economics, some life science, and some things about matter and the moon. All of these endeavors were deemed by the experts as being important for second-graders to know how to do.

During our time together this year, we cohabitants of Room 119 were also quite busy with things that had very little to do with our instructional standards as we learned about ourselves and each other. Twenty-three people in one room for approximately 900 hours, that’s a lot of time with a passel of people in a small space, a heaping mass of lively humanity.

We laughed, we cried, we tripped, we fell out of our chairs, we argued, we made up, we hurt each other’s feelings, we lied, we cheated, we forgave each other, we played, we drew, we spelled things wrong, we spelled things right, we bled, we asked for band-aids, we asked to see the nurse, we sneezed, we coughed, we had lice, we asked to call a parent, we asked to go to the bathroom, we said it was an emergency, we stayed too long, we said mean things, we said sweet things, we asked a thousand questions, we raised our hands, we spoke out of turn, we were rude, we were polite, we complained, we joked, we hit each other, we ran into each other, we poked each other with fingers and pencils, we sharpened pencils, we broke the points and sharpened them again, we lost scissors and books and notes and jackets and lunch boxes, we found some of those things and swore someone stole the others, we became friends, we became enemies, we became friends again, we told on each other, we broke things, we fixed things, we colored, we cut, we started over, we glued and stapled, we ate our snacks, we shared our snacks, we fought over our food, we had our hearts broken and glued back together, we lost teeth, we put them in a baggie, we shared, we kept secrets, we fooled around, we didn't pay attention, we were sorry, and we learned our lessons.

Our class this year was a passionate one. Our highs were higher and our lows were lower. Despite the fact we could break out in a rage at the the smallest thing, we were the most caring group I think I've ever seen. We helped each other when we needed a hand, we checked on our friends, we worried about hurt feelings, and we railed against an injustice to one of us.

Like the old woman in her shoe, there were times when I didn't know what to do, but we prevailed, and our sum became more than our parts, and we were known as Mayo's class. Before we knew it, seven-year-olds had become eight, and a fifty-nine-year-old teacher was somehow sixty, and then April became May.

And so, we will move on into summer and into our next year, to a new teacher, to new students, but never again will these 23 people ever spend hours together in Room 119. The thought makes me rather sad.