Archive for February, 2009

A teacher in my building died this week.

The students mostly found out either Thursday evening or Friday morning. They got the word mainly
from family members or peers, since our administrators decided not to make an official announcement.

Today was hard.

Fortunately, we already had a half-day scheduled to kick off President’s Day weekend.
I’m still grieving. He was a good man and a good teacher.

Today reminded me of old Ebenezer getting his ghostly visits. Ghosts from the past, present, and
future have visited my disheveled mind today.

Past

I was in tenth grade — about 15 or 16 years old — when I heard that my first high school art
teacher had died.

She had been one of my favorite teachers. Her dry observations about art, life, and teaching were
equal parts hilarious and insightful. She bore the stupidity of my classmates with many
longsuffering sighs, and she encouraged me to take advanced art, which was taught by her husband.

One day, on the way home from school, she had a stroke. Her car swerved and collided with other
vehicles. She was placed on life support while doctors tried to deal with the severe bleeding
inside her skull. Two weeks later, they pulled the plug.

Her husband — whose class I was taking at the time — was out for about eight or nine weeks.

Present

I don’t react immediately to tragic news. My tears flow when I witness other people’s reactions,
as though I need to empathize with others to express my own pain.

Students walk down the hall with tears streaming down their cheeks. They quietly sob in class.
They try to comfort their friends with inexperienced, ineffective pats and platitudes.

It’s all I can do to hold myself together, to act professional. I look at the grieving ones as
little as possible, trying to focus my attention on the students who were not in his class or who
are better at hiding their grief and shock.

It’s hard.

Future

Someday my time will end.

I hope that it will be many decades from now… my family tends to be long-lived, frequently
reaching the upper nineties while still sound in mind and body.

On the other hand, it may well happen during my teaching career. Looking at students’ faces today,
I know that I am seeing the same shock, the same grief that other teachers may see after I’ve lost
my sight forever.

As with Ebenezer and his final ghost, I see one possible future haunting the faces of my students
today. Like Ebenezer, I hope that this future does not arrive.

Like Ebenezer, all I can do is accept my own mortality and live my life as best I can.

Please

Please pray for the family, the friends, the co-workers, and — perhaps most of all — the students
of our departed teacher.

(Photo credit and license)

Why do I teach?

I could answer this question with some starry-eyed fluffy-footed flannel-pajama-clad tripe about the youthful enthusiasm and innocence that radiates from the eager young minds as they enter my classroom, their intellectual safe haven, where they can express their love of learning and curiosity about the world without fear of criticism from their peers.

I could, but I do like to include a “shred of truth” with every blog post, and such an answer would pretty much close the door to that.

So… why do I teach?

Because sometimes, in between reminding this girl to watch her language and that boy to stop wasting our time and those kids not to throw things, not ever, in my classroom, especially not 1100-page textbooks from a distance of 20 feet…

…in between being harassed by parents because it’s obviously my fault the kids never turned in their essays or returned their books or learned that sometimes the real world kinda sucks and they’d better get used to it…

…in between the parents who think their 14-year-old should still be reading the Ramona books but never, ever, that Harry Potter witchcraft devil’s work and certainly nothing with cussing and the parents who don’t want their child to learn about the Holocaust or the Civil Rights Movement or any of that other wussy liberal crap I’m trying to shove down their throats…

…in between the administrators who want me to monitor the boys’ bathroom even though I could lose my certificate over it and the state officials who think my students need to know exactly what curriculum standards we’re learning today, even though the standards are written in jargon my students would need college degrees to understand, and due to the very nature of English and Language Arts we’re doing about fifteen standards at once, anyway…

…sometimes, more frequently than you’d expect, a student asks a question or makes a comment that, deliberately or not, leaves me laughing my head off, or that makes me pause and consider something really cool that I’d never thought about before, or that reminds me that a precious few really are interested in learning what I have to teach.

Occasionally, in between the your-boyfriend-snuck-off-with-that-girl drama and the I’m-not-reading-because-Shakespeare-didn’t-ride-bulls-like-me apathy, I even have a former student walking in through my door between classes to tell me how much they enjoyed my class and miss me, especially since now they have that teacher for English and I was way cooler.

Those are nice.  The ones I like even better are the ones who don’t say I’m cooler, but instead say I taught them more than most of their teachers.

The times I like most of all, the times that are so rare that I almost forget they happen at all, are when a student walks in on a teacher work day (when no students are supposed to be at school) and thanks me for all I’ve done for them.

I think that’s happened about three or four times in the last three years.

Once, this happened while a parent was whining to me out in the hall about something for which her sweet angel really shouldn’t have been penalized (yeah, right).  The ex-student who had come to visit stood around awkwardly for a minute before walking into my classroom and scrounging up paper and a pen.  She wrote for a while, then left with a quiet wave.

When my entirely calm, pleasant, denser-than-a-neutron-star demeanor completely frustrated the upset parent, who stormed off in search of an administrator (who fussed at her for wasting my time, heh heh), I entered my classroom.  On top of my desk was a note.

Coach Mac, Mr. MacOdys, (sorry)
You taught me more about English than most of my English teachers ever have, and along the way I learned more history than any of my high school history teachers even tried to teach.

You encouraged me to work hard and told me you were proud of me.

Thank you for inspiring me and being the best teacher I’ve ever had.

I think I’ll make it to retirement, yeah.

(Photo credit and license)