All Kinds of Kinds
Every spring on the last day of school before summer break, a bittersweet “Hoorah!” lassoed my heart. I was the weird little kid who loved summer but couldn’t wait for fall to come so that I could go back to school. Summer was fantastic--it was basketball camp and softball tournaments and riding my bike and running through a sprinkler in the yard--but I loved school. And I loved all the teachers in it. So much so, that when I grew up, I wanted to be one. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend a life.
My substitute for Sunset Elementary, in the summers when we weren’t in session, was my granny and papa’s cellar. The concrete mound with the heavy aluminum door that jutted out of the yard was just off the carport next to the alley by the clothesline. The cellar was damp and musty inside, full of spiders and their many webs (but very rarely snakes.) It smelled like earth and was an eerily cool respite from the oppressive southern Oklahoma heat. I’d carry stacks of books carefully down the steep, concrete steps—children’s books, national geographic magazines, Bible storybooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries—any and everything I could find. I’d bring a spiral notebook or two, a jar full of pens and pencils, and crafty things like glue and tape and scissors, as well as one of Granny’s sewing rulers, though I never really knew what for. (My teachers’ desks just always had one, so I brought it, too, for effect, I guess.) Once there, I’d organize everything as if children would be arriving soon, clamoring to be taught.
When I took off for college a decade down the road, I did so with the solitary objective of getting a degree in education so I could teach. I walked onto the campus at Oklahoma Christian College in the fall of 1983 and plotted out a course of classes year by year that would lead me to that goal. Four years later, with certification in tow, I joined throngs of people who wanted to make a difference in the world, (not just have their summers off, as the world liked to judge from afar). It was a highly competitive market. The job was harder than I ever could have dreamed. It was the most fun I ever had making 37 cents an hour.
Seriously, though, the wages never mattered much. They couldn’t write a check big enough to cover the rewards.
Being a public schoolteacher was a gift. But it was also hard. (An understatement of absurd proportion, yet any attempt to explain why and how would only add to the buffoonery.) It was hard when my grandmother did it in a one room building, and it was hard when I did it three decades ago. But it’s hard on steroids now. It’s grit your teeth, set your jaw, wear a flak jacket hard. The salaries stink, the conditions vacillate daily, politics drive content, and the expectation is not just that teachers teach but that they fix the brokenness of the world while they are at it.
It's an impossible charge.
And yet, come the middle of July, the internal calendars of teachers everywhere will shift as their hearts and minds start getting ready for the resumption of school in the fall.
Lifer-teachers are a towering breed of believers who love their craft and live tethered to their calling—the chance to make an impact in the life of a random child. And while their purpose is the chain that links them all to one another, they are as different as the wind.
They come in a variety of packages, these superheroes of ours--chilled and intense, heavy and thin, funny and serious, entertaining and boring. But we all remember one. Or two. Or all of them, if you’re like me. These memories, of course, live wrapped in where we were on the continuum of becoming when our daily lives ran headfirst into theirs. That’s why their memory sticks. Many--long after we collide—stay vivid in our minds.
We remember the ones who wore funky glasses or had coffee breath or always arrived disheveled as if they’d just realized while reading a book on a pillow by a window that they must jump up and run to school. We remember their antitheses, too. The ones who came in clean and pressed, their hair never in need of a cut or a style, the kind of no-nonsense appearance that made us unable to imagine that they ever took off their shoes. We remember the ones whose classroom we could crawl out the back of without them ever knowing we were gone, as well as the ones who were sticklers for how straight we sat up in our chairs.
It takes all kinds of kinds to make us who we are.
We also remember the ones who came to our ballgames and our recitals, even if they didn’t understand sports or enjoy amateur music. We remember the song they taught us to help memorize the states and all their capitols, the trick they shared for recognizing a preposition (anywhere a cat can go), and how many times they reiterated the need to wear safety glasses when it came time to dissect a frog. We remember them and what they did because they were the ones beside us at the corners of our development. Sometimes they pushed us, sometimes they pulled. Sometimes they just stepped out of the way. But they were there. As a result, part of them stays lodged in us long after we move on.
Teaching is an art. It’s a profession that requires competence and confidence, as well as a people-skill list that would be, on printed paper, easily a mile and a half long. Teachers must be therapists and diplomats, protectors and healers, innovators and engineers. And yet, neither their status nor their paychecks reflect the work they do. Teachers help build human beings.
What kind of world do we live in if that doesn’t reign supreme?
This month a whole bunch of teachers will start readying their rooms. If not in the tangible building, in the corridors of their mind. They will plot and plan in preparation for the job they get to do. The one that makes them giddy inside. The very same one that drips with danger and dilemma, the one they do in spite of the battering and the blame. They will show up in the fall and they will teach because there’s nothing else on earth they’d rather do.