Between Classes

My first year of teaching, I was the school’s first new hire in about five years. Within another year, however, the school hired about a half dozen new teachers. The school created an office space from an old book closet, lining up our desks one behind the other. No computers. No phones. One light bulb above our heads. No student entry. We loved it.

We taught in a school district that qualified us to have our student loans repaid by the federal government. Alas, though Congress had passed such legislation, it had not funded it. We got a certificate thanking us for our service instead. Suffice it to say, our students dealt with tremendously difficult personal lives, and those problems spilled into our classrooms.

Huddled together in our book closet, we would support each other through our tumultuous days as we sought methods to manage our classes and teach our content. Our vernacular often included referring to our students as “my kids.” One day, an angular, slight, sincere young history teacher interrupted me as I detailed something “my kids” had done. “Actually, Kate, they aren’t our kids. Our kids will receive prenatal nutrition. Our kids will listen to books we read aloud. Our kids won’t see somebody shot in the parking lot outside their apartments before they turn ten. I love our students, too, but I’m not going to call them my kids any more. They’re my students; I’m their teacher. I’m going to do everything I can for them, but I can’t do for these students what I would do for my own children. It isn’t possible to teach tenth grade and think I can compensate for the previous fifteen years.”

Wow. Tears still spring into my eyes as I remember the pained expression on her face and the gleam in her eyes as she articulated such a basic truth none of us had intuited for ourselves. She’d hated to realize what she said, and she hated to tell us, but watching us think the right lesson plan could compensate for so much of what our students confronted every day required an illusion in which she could no longer participate. Calling students “my kids” didn’t make it so. At the end of every day, our students went home to lives we couldn’t control despite using language to call them our own.

I haven’t ditched the “my,” but I’ve let go of the “kids.”