Sometimes as a middle school math teacher I cling to things for encouragement that others think are strange. Sometimes you cling to whatever you can find, because too often there just isn’t much to be had.
The other evening a former student saw me at Zips and made a point to wave from outside the window. When she came inside she greeted me with great enthusiasm and asked if I remembered her. I had to admit she looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her name. When she said it, though, I remembered. I remembered some troubled times. I remembered she moved from a remedial class to my class against her will. At first she fought the change, but over time I was able to win her over and we got along great. It was a victory of sorts for both of us. She discovered she was capable of more than she thought and I found great worth in every small success that she had.
And then she moved.
She didn’t want to move. She emailed me and messaged me on Facebook. And after a year had past, I didn’t hear from her anymore. Now, three years after her move, she was standing in Zips.
It is hard for me to know what to do in those situations. Inside I was happy to see her and happy for her, because I know she is back where she wants to be. But as a male teacher to a female student, there is only so much you can express and everything feels awkward. I talked to her a little and let her know it was good to see her, although she probably didn’t get much of a sense for just how happy I was. She talked a little about being in my class and how much she liked it and remembered it. And then she ended with, “I still have the pencil you gave me!”
To my friends who were with me and even to my wife, it sounded like an odd thing to say. In fact one of my friends even said, “that is kind of weird,” but to me it was awesome! I don’t give away pencils frequently and I honestly don’t know why I gave this student a pencil when she was in my class, but it was probably because she didn’t have one and I knew that getting one from her parents was way more difficult than it ever should be. So I gave her a pencil as a very small gesture of compassion... and she still has it!
For me, and I hope for her, it was more than a pencil. The fact that she kept the pencil meant that something happened in my class that she cared about and she didn’t want to forget. It wasn’t about the pencil, it was about something far more important. To me it wasn’t weird at all, it was an incredible encouragement during a time in my career when I need every morsel of encouragement I can scrounge to keep me from quitting.
You see, my goal in teaching is the same today as it has always been - to have a positive influence on those I teach, to be a role model of integrity and honesty and to let kids know that there are some of us that care about them, no matter what baggage they might bring with them. Oh, and I try to teach some math along the way, too! Those are not popular goals in education today (except for the teaching math thing), unless there is a test score attached to it and printable data to show improvement before and after. No one in education would ever explicitly tell me my goals are wrong, but everything we do, every training we have, every discussion about improvement, every goal we set, every strategy we are told to employ, communicates to me (from the educational elite) that old fashioned ideas like being a role model and building positive relationships, are relatively unimportant. The essence of why I teach is discounted, by persistent action and mandates every day.
So every day I question my motives and I question my goals. I wonder if I am right to fight the system for the sake of something that so many are indifferent about. At times I wonder if I am just an old, delusional fool. There are so many days when I can’t tell if I even met my own goal and there are some days when I am sure I haven’t. When enough of those days run together the depression start to set in and I feel like giving up. I begin to wonder if maybe the suits that dictate my hoops to jump through, are right.
But then someone talks about a pencil I gave them three years ago...
It might sound absurd to some, but something as silly as that pencil reminds me that there is more to teaching than test scores, more than forms with the right boxes checked off and more than mind-numbing meetings about that latest educational lingo spelled out in a clever acronym. That pencil tells me I am right - that positive relationships still matter. That pencil tells me I can still make a difference, in the way I have always believed I should. To some it is only a pencil, but to me it is reason for hope. And that encounter that seemed so strange to my friend, will help me get up for another day.
