Teaching and Learning Relationships

Here you have it: the post I've been all cranky about for a good long couple of weeks! Prepare yourselves. It's agonizingly verbose.

Who knows how it will turn out? All I know is this: I survived my 7th Parent Night. The research on this fact is so solid that even the textbooks reflect it: the family is the primary agent of an individual's education. It is also every individual's most important agent of political socialization. Imagine my shock when that smart, quiet kid (who seems like he should be bumped up a level into Accelerated) walked into my classroom with one parent who was definitely totally wasted and another who may or may not have been.

Imagine the opportunity with which I was presented when the ADD 6th grade brother of one of my students marched up to my computer mouse and started playing with the freerice.com game I had projected on the whiteboard. "Is this Hungary?" he asked. "Click it and find out. Yay! It WAS Hungary. Good job!"
"What country is this?"
"How can you find out?"
He clicked it. I turned to his mother and said, "This is kind of how I teach."

The fact of the matter is that by and large, it is only the smart, motivated students whose families will show up for Parent Night.

So imagine my delight when that smart, motivated AVID student walked in holding an 8-month-old little sister with whom he was clearly and obviously totally in love. Delight that multiplied when he plopped her down into the chair where he sits and said, "One day maybe you'll sit right here," and a face-cracking grin spread over her precious lil face.

One day, maybe.

I am presently reminded of an e-mail that I have to send to the counseling office about one of my students. Soon, the school will open up a new section of World Geography and take some of my students away. It is vitally important to me that I get to keep her, because one special long-ago day, her father (whose mere presence in the same room as mine had an obscene talent for inspiring me to cry) put his hand upon my shoulder and said to me, "You are the first teacher I have ever known who has begged for my permission to KEEP a child in a classroom."

The past 35 years of my life have taught me, though, that those things which are vitally important to me are the very things that are likely to be taken away. There was a moment when I chose to try not to let anything be vitally important anymore. It's a script that I'm trying to flip. But in this particular situation, I vow to ride the wave and be okay with the outcome, whatever it may be.

The school day that ended with Parent Night was not the best day in the history of my career, so before the event I dreaded her father coming into my classroom. Surely, without a doubt...I would have burst into tears. Imagine, then, my illogical disappointment when that family was absent from Parent Night.

I respect and value the contribution to my life that certain people who love me have made.
"You have to let it go."
I respect and value the position of letting it go.
But I have much love for those members of my families, bio and chosen, who have agreed to disagree with that remark.

This afternoon I was blessed with a soliloquy from one of my esteemed new colleagues. I shared my heart with him and asked him the million-dollar-question. I have posed it many times before and will pose it many times again. Are we interchangeable parts, or are we unique individual manifestations of the human spirit?

Will the answer matter on the day the world ends?

For those of you who read this who have never been public school teachers, I pose this question: if you had had a different history teacher, would you have turned out to be a different person? The answer, about which I have no clue, has long been a mystery to me. It is an intriguing question.

My new colleague continued by announcing his theory that we would all sink if we didn't have each other.

We are all creative people, drawn to other creative people. This is why we sit around campfires basking in each other's awesomeness, asking each other what OTHER people do when they sit around campfires because let's be honest: clearly, no other campfire-sitters can come anywhere close to being nearly as awesome as we are. But they all ARE, aren't they?

The aforementioned esteemed new colleague shakes his head vigorously when I insist that Rome has fallen and we're headed for the next Dark Ages.

"No way. This is the Pax Romana," he says.

Is it?