I'm off by a couple of days, but better late than never. Not until yesterday did I realize Sunday was National Teachers Day, but then I'm not a teacher anymore, although I spent a lifetime at the job.
So I googled "National Teachers Day," and found this image and a half-dozen others just as anachronistic. Fifty million K-12 students in this country right now, but I'm thinking very few have ever taken an apple for the teacher. What's more, there are no blackboards, especially now when formal education has all migrated to the web.
But this old teacher received a sweet surprise this morning, when this note was posted on my FB timeline:
Back in the day I got invites to students' weddings, I often pulled out some defining Siouxland landscape, put it a frame, maybe even said something similar--"remember where you fell in love," and sent it off as a wedding present. I certainly do remember her, both of them, a couple of Californians who had to come to rural Iowa to find each other. Great kids.
Her thanks this morning remind me of the mystery of the classroom, how sometimes random comments, in class or out, are what really stick to a kid's insides. You might think you're teaching Thoreau, but what adheres to character--for good or bad--can't be pulled out of Walden Pond. You have no way of knowing when or where conditions are just right to plant something in the soul. You just hope you get used for good.
When I think about it, I'm amazed how little I miss the teaching, how satisfying retirement really is--no more pressure to conjure something special on a blackboard--no more blackboards. But I have never--not for one day--before or after that moment I left, regretted what was, I'm sure, my lifetime's calling. Not for a moment.
This morning, this ex-teacher, a few days after Teacher's Day, is thankful, not simply for all those years in a classroom, but for what, through all those years, those great kids gave me.
Lots more than apples.
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