It is easy for teaching to get you down. On a daily basis I hear complaints in the staffroom like “The students just don’t care anymore” or “I wish the students would work harder” or “Jimmy skipped class again.” It can be tiring. It can be frustrating. But even with the exhaustion that comes at the end of May, after 9 months of teaching, and given the annoyance that mounts when students choose 7-11 over class when it’s +25 out, I think that teaching is the most satisfying job in the world. Knowing you made a difference, no matter how small, in a student’s life makes it all worth while. My wife often says that teaching is like planting a seed. It may take a while to see the fruits of your labour — once a student has moved on from your class or school.
In order to illustrate, I will take you back… I was in my 3rd year of teaching, and had moved from teaching in a white middle-upper class bedroom community to one that was more rural. Many students came from farms, or at least lived in the small town 25 minutes from the city I lived in. Generally speaking, not many parents commuted to the city for work (though now this town has exploded and is a large bedroom community – I must be getting old.) I was teaching a grade 7/8 split, and it was the first year that the school had a grade 8 class — previously it was a K-6, then K-7. Among the 20 grade 7s and 8 grade 8s were two young men from a neaby reserve. It was the first year their reserve had bussed students to this school – some families didn’t feel that the school on reserve was meeting the needs of their kids. These two young men entered a white washed world. They were the only First Nations students in the class and two of only a handful of in the whole school. They stuck out like sore thumbs. And they had not had positive experiences with schools. For an early creative writing assignment, one of them wrote about the horrible teacher they had the year before. Whenever mentioning their time in his class, they would utter words that would cause my blog to be censored if I repeated them and hearing the stories they told let me know he deserved every adjective they used. I did my best to engage these two boys, working with another teacher to seek out reading level appropriate engaging literature, and doing my best to differentiate my classroom. All of that, though, took the back seat to my personal efforts to engage them. When they first came, they wouldn’t even lift their heads from their desks – and through a focussed regime of teasing and probing questions to show I cared about them, I drew them out of their shells. Somewhat. I’m not going to say that they were totally new students by the end of the year – they still had their baggage from past schooling, and they still had most of the learning gaps they had aquired over the previous 6 years – but I think they saw me as a positive adult in their lives, and grade 7 as better than the previous year had been.
As teachers are wont to do when employed by a board and not a school, I moved the next year, 100 km northwest, to a position as a Vice-Principal. But I always wondered what happened to those two boys.
Since then, we moved overseas, came back, and I’ve taught for two years at an inner city school, populated by predominently First Nations students. My first year, when I learned that one of my students was from the same reserve as these boys, I quizzed her about their whereabouts. According to her, one was in custody (read: youth jail) and the other was hanging around, not doing much. This saddened me, but I told her to say hi to them from me should they ever cross paths.
Fast forward to yesterday. I had been hearing the name of one of the boys in the office every once in a while – he was a student who was registered, but never showed up. Then, I saw this man (he’s 18 now!) come into the office to ask for a bandaid. It was the young man who had been told was in custody. It took him a second to remember me, but I got a smile out of him as I reminded him about the year he was in my classroom. Today I saw him from a distance, and he smiled and waved hello. He is back doing an Adult 12 – a program where students who are 18 or over and have been out of school for two years can earn a grade 12 diploma in a shorter period of time.
As I was leaving work today, there was a young man sitting at the bus stop and he turned and yelled at me, “Hey are you ____________? (he used my last name, which is hard to spell and harder to pronounce — his pronounciation was perfect.) I couldn’t see who it was so I said, yeah, and approached him. “Do you remember me?” he challenged. This is the question that every teacher hates — so many students over the years to keep track of! However, this one was easy — It was the second young man from my grade 7 class. “I was in your class at _________ Elementary,” he said.
“I know!” I replied, calling him by name, “I was thinking about you the other day. Did you know so-and-so from our class is going to school here now? What are you up to?”
He told me he works at a local convenience store, and that he dropped out of school part way through grade 10. He looked down as he told me this. “I should be graduating this year,” he said.
“Well, that’s okay,” I was quick to reply. “If ever want to graduate, you can do it in a year because you’ve been out of school for so long. If you decide you want to, come and see me and we’ll set you up.” He brightened a bit.
“Nice to see you, Mr. _____________.”
“You too.”
Now, I know that reading this, you’re thinking, geeze Teaching, this is a story about two of your students who have been failures. Both dropped out, one ended up in jail for a while, and the other has a job doing menial work. You may be partially right — however, the reality is that these boys both remembered grade 7. And while I didn’t (and couldn’t) work miracles on them in grade 7, they both remember it as a positive experience. And by the sounds of it, they did not have many before or after with school. Maybe next year, they’ll re-enter my classroom, and we can pick up where we left off. A small victory? Well maybe. But significant nonetheless. Why else would you be a teacher?
