This Teacher's Prayer

A colleague shared this article with me yesterday. It's a longer article but well worth the time. Although my situation is different from most of the teachers in the story, many of my colleagues do feel this way. Maybe I'm just too new to teaching. Teachers do need respect. They need to be paid and treated as the professionals they are. They need all the tools and funding required to do the job. They need more paras and for districts to stop cutting positions for librarians, social workers, and other vital staff who enable them to better focus on the job of teaching and who help students arrive in class more ready to learn.

The main reason I'm sharing this article, though, is because I just want to be more like Edward Lawson. I know there are other teachers like him, and we need many more. It's unfair to ask more of teachers, but most teachers would and do expend whatever effort and resources they can to help their kids. Praying for my kids every day doesn't cost a dime and helps me to remain peaceful and make wise decisions in dealing with them. Loving unconditionally sometimes requires a little more work with certain students, but the reward far exceeds any frustration and effort, and it's also free. Putting my whole heart into what I do and looking for the needs my students have that fall outside of what I was hired to teach them means that my heart is on the line: bare and exposed to whatever my kids are suffering but also open to all the love, joy, pride, and laughter they bring me.

 Teachers need respect. They need to be paid enough to support their families, especially if we want to have quality teachers. (We could never afford to pay what they are truly worth, and that's likely far more than most people expect.) Teachers need support AND funding for the schools where they teach--for the STUDENTS they teach. Perhaps most of all, they need your prayers. Their students and their students' families need your prayers. But don't stop there.

Find ways to be actively involved in your communities, to support teachers, students, and families. We're all in this together. If we want our communities and nation to be better, taking care of our children is essential to that success. Schools are not only where children are taught to read and write and do arithmetic; they are where so many children's mental, physical, social, and emotional problems are identified and addressed.

Hopes and Fears

Scanning the radio dial on the drive home from work today, I paused on NPR’s All Things Considered just in time to hear one of the young men I got to know years ago when I was an adult volunteer in a youth organization. He had graduated high school, served in the Marine Corps, fought and was wounded in Afghanistan, and then went to college and did a stint in AmeriCorps. He now teaches at the school where I did my student teaching last year, and it was nice to run into him in the halls or talk with him during teacher inservice days. Although the view he expressed on arming teachers to defend students is different from (though not counter to) my own, I was proud of him for what he said. We would each fight for and protect our students in our own way—out of duty but mostly out of love.

A few weeks ago, one of my students asked, “How many kids did you say you have, Mrs. Bader?” I answered, “104: I count all of you as my kids, too.” They probably don’t realize how true that is. I brag about them, laugh with my husband over the funny things they say, and pray for them each day. And I worry about them even though I am not typically a worrier.

I worry because I know the things that many of them are going through and because I know there are many more things I don’t know about. I may worry more about them than my own kids because I know their lives less, have less say, less time with them. I worry about the choices they will make for their lives after they leave my classroom and our school: for the day, for the year, for good.

Some of the choices my students will make society condemns and recognizes as dangerous. Some of those choices, on the other hand, are encouraged, condoned, commended; yet these choices will lead them in the path of danger, too. I do not know what the best path is for each of my students any more than I knew what was best for my own children, nor are these my choices to make, so I do what I can.

I ask my students hard questions. I try to get them to ask their own questions, defend their answers, and think deeply about the choices they are making now and will make in the future. I pray that God will guide them and protect them. Even so, as with my own children before them, some of the things these kids—my kids—want scare the hell out of me.

So, it’s comforting to hear that familiar voice on the radio breaking through my thoughts, hopes, and fears--to see one of the kids I worked with, as I have seen my own: grown, happy, brought safely home again from dangerous and scary choices, doing good and making a difference in the world.

For Caleb and Joshua and for Joseph, Joe, and we'll just call him Joe, too

A Sonnet for St. Valentine's

As part of our poetry unit, all my classes read and compared Shakespeare's sonnets 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day") and 130 this week before writing their own sonnets. Sonnet 130 is my favorite, and I love how well students connect with Sonnet 130 once we begin talking about it.
        
        Sonnet 130
        My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; 
        Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
        If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
        If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
        I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
        But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
        And in some perfumes is there more delight
        Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
        I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
        That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
        I grant I never saw a goddess go;
        My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
        And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
        As any she belied with false compare.

At first they couldn't believe how the speaker trashes his mistress. (I had to explain that "mistress does not necessarily mean "side chick." Yes, I phrased it like that, which made them all laugh.) We talked about how she is described in each line and about beauty standards both in Elizabethan England and now. When we got to the ninth line, I underlined "I love to hear her speak," which seems to be the closest the speaker has come to a compliment by that point, although he then says music is more pleasing. Then we talked about how the speaker admits his love is no goddess; she does not fit any ideal standard of beauty and is not high above others but rather treads on the ground. In other words, this woman is fully human as the list of "flaws" has already shown. Finally, we looked at the couplet, which I had explained provides a conclusion or a surprising twist in the sonnet form, and it was like lightbulbs going on all over the room every time.

After looking more closely at Sonnet 130, I asked them, "Which sonnet would you rather have written for you?" Most of them said 130, but some clung to the more pleasant description of 18 until I pointed out the last two words of 130: "false compare." "Who can actually achieve that level of perfection? Who wants to live constantly trying to meet that standard?" I asked. That quickly put everyone on the 130 side, and then I took them back to "I love to hear her speak yet well I know/That music hath a far more pleasing sound."

It's noteworthy that the one compliment the speaker pays his mistress prior to the couplet is that he loves to hear her speak. Rather than praising her physical beauty and comparing it to some arbitrary and unattainable standard, he says he loves to hear her speak, even if he knows her voice does not have the same pleasing quality as music. "How many of you," I asked, "want the people you care about to be interested in what you have to say?" They all nodded in unison, their eyes on me, cell phones and Chromebooks forgotten (miracle of miracles!), if only for a brief moment. "How many of you want to be loved and remembered for what you say and think and for who you are on the inside instead of how you look on the outside?

If I could have captured the looks on their faces then to show it to you now, no one would ever ask again why we should study literature or whether Shakespeare is still relevant today. (At least no adult would.) It was the look of not only profound revelation and full understanding of a text but also the realization that the text understands them. If you don't know how it is possible that a book or poem--an inanimate object, whether brought into being yesterday or centuries ago--can understand a living, breathing human, let alone a classroom of teenagers, I pity you because it can only mean that you have not experienced this phenomenon for yourself. It is a moment of true connection between one human heart or mind and another and also between all humankind. To know that another person and, in fact, may people, have had and do have the same thoughts and feelings as you (especially as a teenager) makes the world a much less lonely place. It makes our burdens more bearable and the world at once smaller and ever-expanding.

P.S. Dear students, I do love to hear you speak, even if I frequently have to tell you to shut up so we can get to what we are supposed to be learning and speaking about. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas about what we are studying in class and for the times you trust me enough to talk about what is going on in your lives or what is important to you beyond school. I love the people you are on the inside and all the ways you are showing it more and more each day on the outside. You are just the sort of lovely that belies all false compare.