To anyone but me, it surely seems the silliest of dreams. I walk into the room, warm and full of the smells of white glue and chalk dust, crayon wax and pencil shavings. I brush snow off my coat and hang it into a crowded closet besides boxes and boxes of patterns, posters, pictures, glitter, pipe cleaners, and sticky tack in reserve. The room is dark until I flip the switch that livens the buzzing of fluorescent lights, and I set to work readying a chalkboard with the things we need to know for the day and setting the desktop computer a-whir, ready to check emails. I sit in the big chair behind the big desk, and I peer out at all the little ones, tops wiped clear the evening before, ready for another fresh start.
When I try to consider my favorite season, I often hang up on the notion that really, what I like is the very beginning of each, probably none more or less than the next. These days are much the same, while no two are alike, each offers its own beginning and its own promise. A blackboard wiped free of white clouds, coat hooks empty but for the stray hat and boot or two. I sip black coffee in the dream, and when a bell rings, the clamor of little children that had been confined to the cafeteria moments before gradually floods into the hall, then the buzz makes its way to my room where I greet with smiles and squeezes, hearing one story after another and directing the energy of the morning to readying ourselves for the day.
I don’t just dream of this scenario, but long for it. I think I have for as long as I can recall having even the faintest idea that someday I would grow up and be able to be the one seated in the rocking chair, picture book balanced on a knee, making words spring to life. From second grade, when I’d bound down the hall to the first grade room, math flashcards in hand, ready to spend recess quizzing and helping the younger students. From third grade, when my teacher always participated in our writing activities, words pouring onto paper to create poems and songs and stories that we listened to as intently as if she’d composed the works of Shakespeare himself. From middle school, when my teachers told me what a good teacher they knew I would be. From high school when I struggled with a project where we were instructed to research three careers that may interest us, because, truly, I never had anything else in mind.
I like to think I was just made for this—somehow, I want to consider that God put me together, and pulled a mind off the shelf, clearly stamped with the phrase “passionate teacher,” perhaps a heart marked “nurturer,” and hands marked “will only write legibly in washable marker.” When he polished me up, maybe he handed me off to some angel and said, “Put her some place where she can learn for all her life and share every bit of it with those around her—it’s all she will ever want to do.”
Funny, then, twenty-three years, a shining school record, two degrees, and countless jobs working with children later, I’m not greeted every morning by those fluorescent lights or the coat closet packed with my supplies hoard. I wake up each morning, and without a shower or a cup of coffee, I bundle into as many layers as the day demands, trek through the cornfield, then the park, and then town, and enter the halls of the noisiest building I’ve ever known. Children bump and bustle, shout, push, and crash into one another, bound over anything in their way, and greet each other with smacks and handshakes, and cries in two languages, both of which just hum through my mind as babble when I’m not yet fully awake.
I suppose you could say I took the road less traveled.
The smells of chalk are replaced by the faint remnant reek of shiny oil based paint. The scrape of chairs on floors creaks through the din of noisy children, and when I make my way into the room where I will teach, I set the whole of my possessions in the building, all of which are in one bag, onto the same chair where I hang my coat—except, of course, on days when the heating system just isn’t up to the task of combating the weather, and we all remained bundled up.
I ask the class to stand up, as is customary at the start of every class—the only show of respect teachers will receive in the forty-five minute period more often than not—and my students’ singsong voices chant together:
“Good morning, dear teacher.”
On a good day, and in the strongest of my classes, this is followed by pupils taking their seats and responding to questions like “How are you?” “What day is it?” “What is the date?” and “Tell me about the weather.”
A good day doesn’t yet elicit the kind of passion every other school I have inhabited always did, but I keep telling myself that it will. I’m comforted by the occasional spark of it. Sometimes it comes as a student follows me across the street on my walk home, answering my questions that I pose in my language and translate to hers. Some days, it warms me from inside when I get a student who normally isn’t bold enough to speak to give an answer. On the best kinds of days, it wraps itself around me in students hugs, the swish of their puffy jackets against my own calming me and reminding me that even in a strange place, in a foreign language, in a world I sometimes fear I’ll never fully understand, I am still a teacher. It’s in me, and it’s not going anywhere. It gets stronger every day. By the end of two years here, I don’t imagine that anyone—least of all myself—could question it.
That’s the dream now, and I’m giving all I’ve got to make it real. In a few years, I don't doubt I'll make my way full circle, back to the dream that's lived in me for so long. For the time being, though, I want to live this one to the fullest.
Wish me luck.
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