Teacher Appreciation?

It was teacher appreciation day yesterday.  I went to work.  I saw around 150 students in my classroom.  I trimmed and matted and hung up over 300 pieces of art.  I folded paper for six year olds who wanted to make snowflakes.  I didn’t remind them that it was eighty degrees outside and snowflakes are long gone.  I cut clay for a boy who lost his last project in an unfortunate smashing. I drew a turtle for a boy and a pony for a girl.  I hugged a kid who lost her tooth in her desk.  I hugged another kid who scrapped her knee on a table.  I said, “please don’t,”  “hush,” and “pick up that marker” around two million times.  I gleefully announced to my colleagues that it was my last Tuesday of teaching this year, because trust me, I am counting.  At the end of the day when I finally had a moment to look at my email, I found a handmade card on my desk from my fourth graders telling me that they loved me and appreciated me and hoped that I would have a great summer and be back for them next year.  It made me smile and I pinned it up on the bulletin board, even though I’m not sure I deserved it.

Teaching wasn’t my first choice of profession.  I’ve written about that before.  I had some vague idea that I’d be some sort of artist or writer and I fell into teaching because I needed a job and I was always good at school. This year teaching has been the hardest school year I have ever had.  Mostly I think it was the cancer.  I started out the year so exhausted from radiation and I just never really got my energy back and there were some things I just didn’t do that I ALWAYS do.  My first graders didn’t do their rainbow unit because I just couldn’t bear to sort through the crayons and pull out all the indigos.  My second graders didn’t completely finish their Mondrian style paintings because I couldn’t bear the chaos.  A bunch of the second graders didn’t get wind chimes and I can’t even begin to retell the saga of what went down with that story.  And for the first time in eight years my fifth graders didn’t make paper masks.  The thought of dragging out all the supplies for that project was so exhausting.  The surgery in February didn’t help, because I was gone for several weeks and my body just hasn’t fully recovered from all the trauma.  There are kids that came while I was gone that I don’t even really know.  And I was looking through the final stuff, all I could think was, wow, there is so much we didn’t get to this year.

To complicate things, ever since, my son got sick, I’ve questioned everything I ever thought about education.   I always told him to go to school and work hard and get good grades and go to college to have a successful job later down the road.  Shayne  did those things, even though he hated school to almost phobic proportions.  He tried to tell me, make me understand, but I didn’t get it.  School is what I know.  It’s what everyone has to do.  My response to him was, come on, suck it up and do it.   And he ended up homeless in LA, carrying around a backpack with an Allen wrench and a sweet potato afraid that the government was infiltrating his toothpaste.  I never saw that coming.  So now I watch kids line up in the halls like little robots and I wonder why we make them do that.  No where else in life do we walk in a single file procession.  I watch them air write words and read nonsense words and raise their hands to speak and I kind of think, really?  Is this what’s best for kids?  I show kids how to make a bowl out of a lump of clay and teach them about color and I think in my head the whole time.   Why am I doing this?  Does it matter?  Who cares if yellow is a primary color?  Is knowing any of this going to be of any value?   I think we lie to kids about what is important every damn day.  But I’m not really sure myself what is important or what really matters.

I saw my first grade teacher a few weeks ago.  She gave me a hug and told me that she was so sorry to hear that I’d been struggling with my health.  She is the teacher that taught me the difference between to, too, and two, and how to read contractions like don’t and can’t.  She’s the teacher that taught me to love school.  I also saw my high school math teacher’s obituary on Facebook.  It really hit me hard.    I can’t say I learned much in his class, but that was on me.  In my arrogant teenage years, I’d already decided that trig wasn’t going to be useful to me when I was painting sets on Broadway and I spent a lot of class time daydreaming and drawing flowers on my graphs.  But  a decade later, I got a chance to work as his colleague and I sat in on the same math class I’d blown off as a teenager.  I found him to be engaging and I got a ninety two on my final.  I’d sit with him at lunch and we’d exchange glances when someone at the lunch table said something asinine and sometimes I’d hang out with him and we’d watch a baseball game on tv.   I knew he moved back to Illinois to be with his family, but I never got in touch, even though I thought about it all the time.  My high school English teacher lives a block or so away.  I waved at her when I saw her getting her mail a few days ago and I realized that she is moving slowly and is sort of stooped now.  If I’m nearly fifty, she’s probably nearly seventy.  How did that happen?  She’s the one that encouraged me to write, made me believe that I could do anything I wanted with words.  And next month, I’m going to Chicago with my girlfriends and I keep wondering how I’m going to make it out to the convent to see the nuns.  The only nun left that really knows me is Sister Amy and she is nearly 100 years old.  She never was my teacher, but I learned so much from her.  She lost her mother when she was a young child, and was sent to St. Scholastica when she was just a little girl.  The nuns taught her everything she knew and she is kind and gentle and smart as hell.  She always remembers my birthday and asks about my family.  I will never forget how she used to take Shayne to breakfast with her and cut up his French toast, even though he was perfectly capable of cutting his own toast.   I can’t not see her, because what if she doesn’t make it till my next visit?  I’ll never forgive myself.

With all the strong teachers in my life I guess it’s no surprise that’s the direction I headed in my own life, even if it wasn’t my initial plan.  I have the utmost confidence in my artistic abilities and the ability to string words together to deliver a message, but feel sort of shaky about leading hundreds of children to unlock possibilities and encourage them to find their voices.  Teachers have to be self-sacrificing and patient and dedicated.  Children are strong and resilient, but fragile and impressionable.  I don’t ever really know the impact I’m having.  If I’m in the classroom touching hundreds of lives, I want to do it well, better than I did this year.  Part of me wishes that I could have a do over.  But I think do overs are one of those lies we offer up to kids.  Maybe because we want to still believe in them ourselves.  I have made a promise to myself to take this summer as a time to find peace and let my body heal and get strong again.  In the fall, I get a fresh start.  That’s about as close to a do-over as I get.  There’s a lot to appreciate about new beginnings.  I appreciate the opportunity to be able to have one.  And I hope next year, when we reach teacher appreciation day, I’m saying, “Bring on the swag.”