For Teachers, Teachers of Teachers & Their Students

Happy September, though to be honest, for many students (and some teachers), September is not such a happy month.  I certainly understand how school encroaches on the freedom to enjoy long lazy days that start late and end late with the opportunity for each of us to choose how to fill the moments in between. I certainly understand that despite any eagerness to see friends more frequently, September brings yellow buses and class bells that order our time, that schedule when we wake, when we eat, when we can go home again.  

Especially when there's a test on Monday, September is the start of that sinking Sunday-night-sinking feeling which will repeat itself every Sunday until it's summer again. Though I have long given up tight schedules and school lunches, a kind of spidery sense reminds me that it's September even before the calendar does.

More than New Year's Day, the start of a new school year fills me with anticipation, a feeling that the coming days stretch before me with unknown possibilities for new books, new discoveries, new friends. Through the years, the gift of hopeful anticipation is what I've always wished for my students. Though I am no longer teaching, it is my continued wish for teachers, teachers of teachers and their students.

As a teacher, I was always aware that a classroom is an insular universe where I could make my own rules, where I could insist on guidelines that could create the kind of world I wished the world would be. Right now the entire earth feels on fire. Terrible things are happening in our country and the world beyond; many families are suffering; many children are hungry; fear circles every corner; and our planet needs tending. I have no classroom door to close or Twizzlers to toss as I did when I celebrated  the small acts of kindness I witnessed in my classroom, schoolyard and cafeteria.

For me, though I did love diagramming sentences, it wasn't so much how to diagram a sentence that I hoped my students would remember. It wasn't the definition of gerunds or dangling participles that I hoped they'd recall as they moved through life. Always, for me, it was the shared book, the kind word, the extra space made on the lunch room bench. 

There are so many wonderful teachers whom I know believe in kindness as much as I do, but it's become harder and harder to shut out the larger world. Harder and harder to close the classroom door and insist on kindness  in a place where kindness has been leached dry. It takes active resistance to remain optimistic about the future each student deserves. But I know that if any profession is motivated to believe in future generations, it's the teaching profession. It is the teachers and those who teach them— both professors and students that bring hope into this tired world. 

This post if for all of you. I guess you can take the teacher out of the classroom, but you can never take the classroom out of the teacher. Happy September to all who celebrate hope, possibility and kindness. I'm rooting for you all!