School begins in three weeks. Again.
I don’t know how many more times I can go through the emotions. A year ago, I crossed a significant threshold by teaching my 1000th student. No confetti rain. No prizes. On the morning I realized I had influenced such a staggering number of young people, I felt a moment of elation–of accomplishment–until I looked into the bathroom mirror and saw all 10,000 of their fingerprints on my aging face. Eight years of concern for children shows in the deep wrinkle on my forehead and in my knotty knuckles. “I am a teacher,” I said, standing taller in my flats, “and eight years of enjoying students shows in my laugh lines too.” Then, I picked up my books and a package of new pens and left home for my life’s work.
I never wanted to become a teacher. I repeat this odd fact incessantly. It is not a realization laced with regret but with wonder. Though I did not want teaching, it seems that teaching wanted me. The classroom called to me, and I walked into it. Last year, I seriously thought about that calling when kids got into my filing cabinet and stole the bags of chips I save for after-school tutoring sessions. Not once, but twice. (You can tell they are 6th graders; they pushed past my open purse to get to the Flaming Hot Cheetos). I thought about that calling when a student made a semi-automatic protractor, which I photographed because it made me laugh.
Then the teacher across the hall returned from his absence, and I showed him the picture with a broad smile.
“Look at this! Isn’t it clever! It’s a semi-automatic protra–…” I sputtered with enthusiasm.
He shook his head as if he had seen it all before. “Weapons of math instruction,” he sighed.
Rats! I thought immediately, perturbed that a math teacher had beat me to a pun. (An excellent one, I might add).
“Let me ask you,” Mr. Numbers continued calmly, “Did he break ten of my protractors before or after you took this picture?”
“That was your protractor? Wait, ten?”
He nodded, smiling.
“Oh.”
See I’m one of those teachers. Maybe I was called to the classroom, in part, because I wasn’t ready to leave it in the first place. I still think like a kid sometimes. Sure, when I was in elementary, my mother disciplined me if I did not take care of my annual ration of school supplies. Hear my “teacher voice” eerily echo hers when I discover a student has gnawed off his pencil’s eraser or picked at the corner of his binder until the cardboard has poked through. But “the kid” in me somersaults for an imaginative idea, and if school supplies must be sacrificed in the process, so be it. Call it Nika’s Second Law of Thermodynamics: Chaos increases over time and for a good cause (philanthropic entropy, I guess). Amusement is always a good cause. We need to laugh, whatever the cost. So, most of the time, there is a certain amount of chaos surrounding me and my classroom.
Kids act like kids because they are kids. Should I criticize them for every little thing, keeping such a tight rein? Anyone who has a flowerbed knows that growth requires space. If they are going to grow up, they are going to need a little room to do so. This may increase the clutter and noise a bit. Students won’t remember a teacher because she has a clean classroom every afternoon. They will remember her because she gave them a clean slate every morning.
I was laughing with a friend today, walking across a parking lot. A woman nearby hollered, “That sounds good! I love to hear laughing! I don’t hear it often enough!”
“I do,” my friend called back, indicating me. I laugh, therefore I am.
The stranger in the parking lot was right. Most adults don’t hear laughter often enough and don’t do it often enough, either. But kids do. They do! Let me admit without apology that I am going to be the last person on earth to stop them.
And I have the laugh lines to prove it.