1) “Be Yourself, K. J.”
Thanks, Dad. I first taught in an urban setting where my white skin made me the minority. I fretted about, well, how white middle class I was. I wanted to be what my students most needed, and I feared my basic self missed the mark. I didn’t want to posture; even then I could see that adopting unnatural slang or fashion would be a disaster. Still though, I longed to be someone with whom students could identify or at least be a little more hip.
My father informed me that no matter what I said or wore, my students (many of whom could be described as disengaged learners) could see a tattoo on my forehead reading, “Took A. P. English and Loved It!” In fact, when my students imitated me, they used a British accent, so far apart was my speech from theirs. “Be yourself, K. J.” he’d intone into the phone from his retirement village in Florida after thirty eight years of teaching. “Students don’t care who a teacher is as long as that teacher’s not a phony or a liar.” I didn’t think his advice was very good, but the teaching conditions in the school stripped me emotionally bare, so I taught nakedly as myself, too exhausted to teach with pretense or guile. I joked frequently, cursed occasionally, and cried often. (In fact, a few years in, one student who’d had me my first year of teaching entertained other students with gentle imitations of me crying. “She cried if we did our work. She cried if we didn’t do our work. Somebody farted—she cried!” he exclaimed to the chortling masses.) I wore the same clothes so many times that students once showed me a chart of how often I wore navy blue pants. (That time I wept because the kids made a chart of their own volition; they’d tracked primary data! Call Science magazine!) After finding gum spit balls covering the back of my head at the end of one school day (No, I never noticed them going in—how long had they been there? Since second period?), I started wearing a bun day in and day out. These boring, suburban qualities that I feared students would use to classify me as “other” became my attributes to which they referred most affectionately. “You’ll know her,” they’d tell people looking for me in the building, “She’ll probably be wearing a denim skirt.” Turns out, my dad was right—students accept competent teachers with sincere, dedicated hearts regardless of their appearance. At this point in my career, I’ve seen beloved teachers come in all shapes, colors, and sizes. Students definitely reward sincerity.