I loved teaching, still love teaching. When my health said it was time to stop, I turned away from the classroom. I now have two granddaughters whom I love without end. Still, I miss the classroom, the eyes of the students as they learn.
The eyes never change.
In the twenty years since my first group of students, I may not recognize them, but they recognize me.
When I see the eyes, I can call up the child-face these adults once had. Suddenly we are talking about their lives and what they are doing as adults. Some have children holding their hand, some are going on to school. I don’t tell them about me, my life goals, because I am not and never was the important one: the students were all that mattered to me.
In the twenty years since my first group of students, I may not recognize them, but they recognize me.

Almost every night I have a dream about teaching. Some are great, where we are on the playground or we are reading a grand book. Others are not.
In those dreams, the teaching situation is desperate, the classroom is an abandoned rotting shell of a building, and the students are scared. So am I. There are so many students with all sorts of needs and we don’t have enough books to go around. Whatever learning happens is up to the teacher, because there is no other source. I see their eyes looking at me, waiting, and that is when I do something.
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Bolivia Road of Death |
I never get to find out what I do, for the dream morphs onto something like driving a school bus along that most dangerous road in Bolivia. Then I wake up.
It all comes down to the teacher and the quality he/she brings to the classroom. Money can be thrown at the needs of the schools, but if the teacher does not have the freedom to teach, nothing will happen.

e ceiling, reams of lined paper can line the walls, and sharpened pencils can lie in laundry baskets.
But, if the teacher does not have the freedom to explore and fulfill the needs of each student, learning will dwindle to the bubbles on Scantron™ test papers.

e ceiling, reams of lined paper can line the walls, and sharpened pencils can lie in laundry baskets.
But, if the teacher does not have the freedom to explore and fulfill the needs of each student, learning will dwindle to the bubbles on Scantron™ test papers.