Despite challenges,
favorite teacher retires a success
From The Morning Call • June 5,
2005
My Favorite Second Grade Teacher is
retiring at the end of this school year, taking with her a
modest pension, the memory of a thousand early mornings, a
thousand late nights, and a thousand 20-minute lunches
plucked from a microwave. Also, a lot of books about wise
animals that speak the King's English.
My Favorite Second Grade Teacher got into the education game
for the same reason as many of her generation: It was a way
to do some good in the world. It was low-paying, but
high-minded, an ideal job for the idealistic, a way to fix
the world or at least make sure it knew how to read. On
occasion, my Favorite Second Grade Teacher felt she did
that.
But all too often, she heard that her profession was a dodge
to get summers off, grab a vacation between Christmas and
New Year's and put it on automatic pilot while her charges
threw spitballs and reversed their b's and d's. She read
analysis after analysis about how her profession was failing
the nation's youth, some written by a pundit from this
newspaper who - trust me on this - would turn into a puddle
of protoplasm if he had to spend one week teaching in a
public school. She read story after story about declining
test scores, criticism after criticism of a crumbling
system, sermon after sermon about how this state program and
that federal mandate was going to fix it all and leave no
child behind.
And, all the time, she knew the simplest of truths: That
good schools and good teachers cannot undo the poisons of
bad parenting and unfortunate genes.
My Favorite Second Grade Teacher didn't know all the reasons
why 7-year-olds and 8-year-olds came to school with such
problems, wretched home lives and psychological disorders
that didn't even have a name when she was learning
double-digit subtraction. She only knew that they did and
that it was her job to straighten it all out during the
six-and-a-half hours she was with them.
My Favorite Second Grade Teacher was grateful for the
bright-eyed, the gifted and the intellectually curious who
passed through her classroom. There were many of them over
the years, and she even had one of the best in mind when she
named her first son. But the ones she talked about the most
were the ones who couldn't learn, who couldn't seem to
overcome the tragedy of a broken family, who seemed doomed
(at such an early age) to repeat the mistakes of their
mothers and fathers.
But my Favorite Second Grade Teacher stayed on top of it
because she couldn't do it any other way. And once in a
while, maybe in a grocery store or a restaurant, a shy
teenager would approach her and say, ''I don't know if you
remember me, but you were my favorite teacher.'' My Favorite
Second Grade Teacher didn't need that to keep going, to keep
coming up with a creative new science program, buy crates of
books at her own expense or make gingerbread houses at
Christmas, clogging up the sinks with gunky icing. But it
made it nice.
My Favorite Second Grade Teacher was modestly compensated
for her work but most people thought that she and her fellow
teachers are paid like CEOs. Counting school time and
fretting over lesson plans at home, it broke down to about
12 hours a day, and my Favorite Second Grade Teacher would
add another couple hours of weekend worry onto that. But she
never complained about it publicly because no one wanted to
hear it. (You get summers off!) In fact, she would've filed
an injunction to stop this column if she knew it was being
written. All she wanted people to know was that her
colleagues at Calypso Elementary School in Bethlehem worked
as hard at it as she did.
Ultimately, My Favorite Second Grade Teacher would say
teaching was worth it. But her profession wore on her mind
and her body, and more than once over the years she
despaired that she was failing as a teacher, failing as a
mother and failing as a wife because there weren't enough
hours in the day to stay on top of it all.
Reliable reports say she succeeded in all three.
Jack McCallum of Hanover Township, Northampton
County, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated,
has been married to his Favorite Second Grade Teacher for 30
years.
Copyright © 2005, The
Morning Call
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