What are teachers grateful for?

paying3tuitions
Tue, 02 Aug 2011 20:30:14 +0000

My teaching has been in several settings. The decade I most treasure was teaching First and Second grades, regular classrooms, in a rural poverty school with students of many races and income levels thrown together. I was able to meet multiple generations of my young students’ families (once even a great-great grandmother!) as everyone used the same grocery store. Through the children or their parents, I’d hear daily about events of the previous night in town before they made the local newspaper. If someone was arrested, I had the child of the batterer, the cop, the lawyer and the judge who’d eventually hear the case, all sitting together in a reading group. Oblivious.

Teaching children how to read was my favorite portion of each day, because I felt as though I was giving them the key to the kingdom, namely literacy.

I realized someday they’d have their own families. To the extent I could, in the smallest way, influence their attitudes and skills NOW to read well, I imagined multiple ripple effects in their ability to work jobs and influence their own households someday.

Sometimes we’d look out our window and see herds of deer. Other times there were police sirens. The children looked to me to make sense of it all. At the exact moment 9/11 occurred, I was reading a book to them…just like the President. I couldn’t tell them what had happened but I knew it would profoundly affect their lives. Today some of them have older siblings overseas in the military.

You touch in every aspect of American life. There’s plenty to think about, aside from the drudgery and administrative tedium that is the pricetag of that profession.