I say this as the husband of a gifted teacher…
Treasure the teachers in your life. Part of my wife’s gift is the joy she takes in her work. She works incredibly hard - if you break it down into hours spent on job-related activities, she’s probably only making a few bucks an hour, overall - and it is clear that many of her students respond. It is clear from correspondence she’s received that Dana has made a difference in her students’ lives and their later education.
But I also responded to an e-mail from one of my 8-year-old daughter’s teachers this morning and it got me to thinking about this. The teacher realized that Maggie was trying to figure her out and just wanted to share it with me.
Maggie really likes this teacher, but she’s confounded by the fact that the teacher is tough. She sets limits and makes it clear to Maggie that there are consequences, when necessary. So Maggie asked me the other day if I ever had a teacher who seemed kind of mean, but wasn’t. And I told her about my high school chorus teacher, who also ended up being my private voice teacher. Mr. Binkley was gruff, sarcastic to a withering degree and absolutely beloved by every student who ever had him for anything. As mean as he could seem - he could be temperamental to an almost chair-throwing degree - students knew one thing about Bob Binkley: he gave a damn. He gave a damn about you. Under his toughness was a kind and generous heart. It was a rare student who didn’t feel at least a little devotion to Bob years after we left that school.
I told Maggie about Mr. Binkley in simple terms, though - just that he seemed mean in class, but that he actually cared more about you and how you were doing than most of the other teachers in school.
Maggie shared what she understood from our talk with her teacher, Ms. S. Ms. S. wrote the following in her e-mail to me (I’ve edited a bit for clarity): “I have to tell you what she told me… ‘cause I think she was applying this to me. She said when my dad was in school he had a teacher he didn’t think was nice but when he talked to [him… he] was really nice so and [dad] actually liked [the teacher]. I said, ‘Maggie do you think I am not nice?’ She said no, you are nice sometimes.”
I told the teacher a fuller version of what I’d said to Maggie. And I thanked her - because I can tell she’s making a difference in my daughter’s life.
Lots of teachers are coasting, picking up a check, doing the bare minimum. Too often, they and the ones who do much worse make the news, get all the press.
But the ones who give a shit? They are GOLD. Treasure them. If you ever had one like that and are in a position to tell them thank you, DO IT. For the best teachers, the ones for whom it is a calling, a word of thanks from an old student, saying “I had no idea what you were doing, but I do now, and thank you,” means more than they could probably express. Teachers like that - the ones I’ve treasured, my own wife, my daughter’s Ms. S. - want to make a difference in someone’s life.
If that’s not a higher calling, I don’t know what is.
Thank you for sharing this.
(I think I want to teach for real, y’all, but it scares the shit out of me. So much responsibility.)
I think this is lovely in a lot of ways, and I am so happy this person has been surrounded by excellent teachers like the ones mentioned.I know from having had great teachers that the effects they have on you can be lifelong. I still remember a poem from a plaque my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Altemose, gave to me, word for word. I had the same reading teacher, Mrs. Johnson, in fourth and sixth grade, and that woman instilled a love of reading and writing in me that I will never, ever forget. My seventh grade writing teacher, Miss Denicoula, did the same thing with writing. Looking back, many of the writing skills I took with me to college and that brought me to where I am now were learned from seventh grade writing with Miss D.
Reading this is stressful for me as a teacher, though. In fact, it makes me want to cry because I know I am not living up to these “excellent teacher” standards about which so many people have such strong opinions. I long to be the type of teacher who is positively affecting kids, but I feel like I am constantly treading water — just trying to stay afloat — and am not having that life-changing impact I wish I could. Maybe I am one of the teachers who is doing the bare minimum; I think people might perceive me that way. But I surely feel like I am constantly working. My students are the only thing I think about. I think about them as soon as I wake up in the morning, I think about them before I go to bed at night. I think about what they say about me and wonder if I should take it personally. I agonize over what they don’t know, I feel sick to my stomach over what I haven’t yet covered.I don’t know what my students think or how they feel about the impact I’m having on their lives. They probably think I am constantly cranky, they probably think I’m mean, and I wonder if they realize that that just comes out because I so badly want them to learn something their behaviors are preventing me from teaching. I am doing the best I can, and that very well may not be enough.
I will tell you one thing: just doing the bare minimum is still a hell of a lot of work.
