On Teaching

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.

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.

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. 

What Dreams May Come

“What dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?”

courtesy of Bing.com

This is from Hamlet, and is one of the few lines I can remember from high school English class.  It was an enigmatic line to me then, being all of fifteen years old, and having seen little of life or death.

Now, of course, that has changed.  Life and death—those are much more real to me.  You might be expecting me to expound on death and how it surrounds us all.  Nah, I want to share dreams of life with you.

I taught first through eighth grades over a twenty year span.  I restarted my teaching career when my youngest child began second grade.  By that time, I was almost 37 years old, with a load of life experiences in my backpack that most of the younger teachers could not have had.  My first class was a fourth grade class whose teacher had to take sick-leave mid-year.  Up to the time I came, there had been 18/eighteen different substitute teachers who went and left after one day. 

It was a rough class, a broken class.  More than that, it was a group of 10-11 year old children who felt abandoned in the one safe place where they could count on being cared for and taught what they needed to know. 

Not an endorsement--but it looks good.

God knows what we all need, and He certainly knew what these children needed: someone to love them, to slug it through, to stay the course with them. 

To say that we endured and came out winners would be too light-hearted.  It was a struggle, almost mental hand-to-hand combat.  Each child had their own issues of pain, divorce, poverty, gang-pressure, and abandonment from home.  They needed—no, they absolutely were desperate for someone to hold onto and to show them the door to a better world. 

Teachers must be warriors for their students.  I was a soft mother type, who made quilts and baked brownies, who taught Sunday school and played the church piano.  But I was also a tenacious and stubborn woman, who saw into the hearts of these hurting kids.  It was a daily test for all of us, and in the end, we were drawn together.  On the last day of school, we were all teary eyed to see school end and our relationship to change. 

Months before, I had entered that classroom as their adversary, another teacher whom they thought would leave them.  My promise was that I was staying, and they were not going to be left with someone else.  I kept my promise. 

Now, I have dreams of my students, over 600 of them, in different situations with me as their teacher.  Sometimes I am driving a bus on a field trip along a crazy Bolivian mountain road.  Sometimes we are in a classroom put together in a bombed out bunker.  In other dreams, teacher friends and I are going to somewhere like Haiti to set up classes for other abandoned children. 

Dreams indeed. 

Write! Just write!

“Write!  Just put your pencil to the paper, and start writing!  Write the spelling list, if you want!  Writing anything ultimately leads to writing something! “   As a teacher of writing, I must have said that to my students thousands of times.  Eventually, students lost the fear of the white paper, and started putting words together, and moved on to thinking of themselves as writers.  No, not just writers:  They were authors!

It all started with a book.  At the beginning of the school year, I chose some awesome books, with wonderful illustrations, excellent language, and magnetic appeal.  With younger students, I pulled out The Great Kapok Tree by Lynne Cherry.  Or I unpacked The Mitten by Jan Brett.  Then there was always Jumanji or The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg.  Amazing books with amazing illustrations and amazing springboard language, all them enticed those future writers/authors.

Older students discovered the writings of Lois Lowry: The Giver, Number the Stars.  Some loved Jeanne DePrau:  The City of Ember series.  How about Red Badge of Courage?  The Screwtape Letters?  To Kill a Mockingbird?  Who can’t read those, and find the head swimming in images, powered by words.

It all started with many books.  Students kept a Reading Response Journal, in which they wrote summaries, new vocabulary, their feelings about what was read.  The great thing was they didn’t have to grab words out of the word-storing part of the brain; they could use the words from the book.  In fact, they were supposed to copy those words when writing about the book.  Write a poem?  They wrote “found poems”.  They went through the book, and copied down lines with strong imagery; they used the simple predicates; they wrote down the subject of the sentence with its modifying adjectives.  Line by line, their poems shouted out the power of writing.  I love teaching.  I loved teaching writing.  I love writing most of all.