Morning Thanks--from the classroom

They're grandparents now, all of them; but they'll always be 17 years old because that's what they were when they sat in rows in front of me. They were kids, and they still should be.
  
I remember them--Patti Haldiman, Sandy Rolli, Tom Dahmen, Bill Hansen, Kathy Meier, Larry Lelle, Gary Meier (there were two of them), Ron Sersch, Becky Staldiman. More too. Several years ago they had a class reunion and sent me an invitation. When I saw the penmanship of the return address, I didn't even have to read the name. 

The night before the first day of school I sat in an ancient hotel on the town square in Monroe, Wisconsin, running through my class list, real kids who, the next morning, would be right there in front of me, names I could barely pronounce and for which I had no reference, names that belonged to real human being-type kids with freckles and sun tans and acne, dressed in madras shirts and bell bottom jeans--and parents who frustrated the heck out of 'em.

They'd be mine. Sounds deranged to say it that way, but for an hour or so at least when they'd be in my room, they would be.  I was shockingly young myself, but I think I understood that what was going to happen in that room would be my responsibility. If it was a good place, if it was a bad place, if it was a boring place, if it was a great place--what it would be depended totally on what I would be.

And who was I? A kid. It was 1970, and I'd just missed the draft because of atrial fibrillation. I'd taken a letter along to my army physical, stood there with the rest of my friends in my skivvies, then got culled like a factory second. I didn't have to go.

I'd found this job in Sunday Milwaukee Journal, driven down to the southwest corner of the state for an interview, and somehow got the job. 

"I get the sense that you walked on the wild side," the administrator said when he thumbed through my recommendations. 

"That's because I drank some beer," I told him, "and I didn't really try to hide it."

At first, he didn't believe me. I'm lucky I got the job, I suppose; but I told him Dordt was a strict religious college and he believed me. Besides, I could coach basketball, do theater, and teach English, a trifecta. I had a job.

It took me only a couple of days to realize that if I played my cards right, I could do this thing. Kids liked me, I could tell. I was one of them.

I don't know that I've ever said this before, but what I came to understand within the first few weeks of that first year was that I loved teaching. Years later, when a friend and colleague and I would walk back home together from the college where we taught, we'd have to pinch each other to remind ourselves that what we were doing in the classroom from day-to-day was what we did for a living--that's how much we loved it.

In the last few years the distance between me and the students got uncomfortably wide. I still liked them, and I think they liked me; but it became hard for me to know what made them tick. I began to understand what it meant to be a "boomer" because being a boomer was something they weren't. Vietnam was their grandparents' era, a history project. And they were all Harry Potter.

Every spring since I retired I've taught an on-line class of high school seniors looking to get a leg up on their college educations. Yesterday I sent in their grades, the last grades I'll ever file. 

I've come a long ways from that second story hotel room just off the town square in Monroe, Wisconsin. I'm more educated--somewhere I've got two graduate diplomas. I couldn't get up and down the basketball floor like I did way back when, and there's absolutely no way I could live with the schedule that administrator--I don't remember his name--gave me that first year. But I honestly think I am who I always was. 

But yesterday when I sent those grades off--they were embarrassingly good, by the way--I was reminded of something it's been easy to forget, and that is what a privilege it's been to be there in a position to watch kids grow, to be a part of it, to participate in learning.

My last book, a collection of short stories, Up the Hill, concerns the goings-on in a cemetery where the residents are quite blessedly entertained by life in the town they've only physically left behind. What happens in those stories, time after time (strange phrase to use in a graveyard) is that the sanctified residents continue to learn--about themselves, about life, about how things work.  I don't think that's heretical because I don't think death will somehow end our growing. In the hereafter, we'll still be learning, don't you think? 

This morning my grades are in for the very last time. I'd like to think that some grandpas and grandmas in and around Monroe, Wisconsin, remember their high school years and their English teacher, a single guy in a Volkswagon, as fondly as I remember them.

But just yesterday, maybe because it was the last time, I couldn't help thinking about what a blessing it was throughout my life to be a part of the growth by which we all become who we will be. This morning, after 43 years of teaching, I'm thankful for the classroom, for being where the Lord God almighty put me for all these years.