The Ones Who Saw Us Before We Could See Ourselves

I threw a book at my fourth-grade teacher. I would like to begin there because any writing praising teachers should contain at least one confession from the defendant. I do not remember what book it was. I hope it was thin. I hope it was paperback. I hope, for the sake of my eternal soul and her dental work, that it was not an encyclopedia.

I remember being angry. I remember being certain that she was wrong, which is one of the great talents of a ten-year-old boy. Ten-year-old boys possess an astonishing certainty about nearly everything while knowing almost nothing about nearly anything. I do not remember the lesson she was teaching.

I remember her.

That may be the mystery of education.

Years disappear. Worksheets vanish. Vocabulary lists evaporate. The intricacies of long division retreat into whatever dark attic of the brain contains state capitals and the parts of a flower. We forget the chapter numbers. We forget the homework assignments. We forget what was on the test. But we remember who looked at us as though we mattered.

We remember the teachers who laughed at our jokes even when the jokes were objectively terrible. We remember the ones who noticed when we were unusually quiet. We remember the teacher who slipped us another chance when we had made a wreck of the first one. We remember who demanded more from us when we were perfectly satisfied offering less.

We remember the ones who saw something.

Sometimes long before we did.

My sixth-grade teacher loved baseball and accountability. So you can imagine how we got along. Baseball, after all, is a game largely constructed around failure and responsibility. You stand alone in the batter’s box. Nobody can swing for you. You miss the ball and everybody sees it. You make an error and a little light appears on the scoreboard informing the entire stadium that yes, Doug did indeed screw that up.

There is something deeply educational about baseball. There is something deeply Catholic about accountability too. My teacher understood this before I did. He understood that mercy does not mean pretending the error never happened. Mercy means helping someone become the kind of person capable of making the next play. He expected things from us.

This was sometimes irritating.

Most worthwhile things are.

Then there was my speech and debate coach. I thought she was too strict. I thought she expected too much. I thought she cared far too intensely about preparation, articulation, argument, discipline, timing, posture, clarity, evidence, and the apparently life-or-death importance of not saying “um” every eleven seconds.

I was young.

And dumb.

A dangerous combination because youth and stupidity frequently arrive wearing the costume of confidence. I did not understand what she was doing. I thought she was correcting speeches.

She was helping build a voice.

Mine.

A voice I would someday use in classrooms and churches and conference halls and studios and microphones and conversations with people carrying grief, joy, doubt, faith, fear, hope, and all the strange cargo human beings bring into a room. She could see something I could not yet see.

Teachers do that.

They stand at the edge of a person’s becoming. And they whisper, push, cajole, insist, encourage, correct, laugh, demand, forgive, repeat themselves for the nine-thousandth time and occasionally consider quietly walking into the woods and beginning an entirely new life under an assumed name.

Because teaching adolescents is insane.

I mean this affectionately.

If you have never stood in front of a classroom filled with twenty-five or thirty young people whose bodies are changing, whose brains are under construction, whose emotions are occasionally governed by mysterious planetary forces, whose social lives contain more geopolitical complexity than the Congress of Vienna, then perhaps refrain from offering teachers too much advice.

They are doing something extraordinary.

They arrive early. They stay late. They buy things with their own money. They answer emails during dinner. They grade papers while everyone else is watching television. They design lessons that sometimes soar beautifully and sometimes crash into the side of a mountain at 9:17 on Tuesday morning.

They prepare activities that took two hours to create and seven minutes for students to destroy. They plan carefully and then discover that the projector does not work. Or someone threw up. Or there is a fire drill. Or two students are breaking up emotionally in row three. Or somebody has lost a Chromebook. Or everybody has lost a pencil.

How is it possible that thirty human beings arrived at school and not one possesses a pencil?

And through all this teachers are supposed to remain calm. Patient. Professional. Encouraging. They are supposed to differentiate instruction and document progress and communicate with parents and manage behavior and understand learning styles and track standards and attend meetings and protect children and notice suffering and challenge gifted students and support struggling ones and remember who has allergies and who needs extended time and who is grieving because Dad moved out and who has started sitting alone at lunch.

And then somebody somewhere says, “Teachers get summers off.”

Which is a sentence best uttered from a safe distance.

Because anyone who has taught knows there is no clean border between teacher and person. The work follows you home.

The students follow you home.

Not literally, hopefully.

But their stories do.

You wonder about them. You worry about them. You wake up thinking about the kid who stopped turning in assignments. You remember the look on the face of the student who bombed the test after trying harder than anyone knew. You replay the moment when you lost your patience and wish you could take it back. You wonder whether the quiet girl near the window understands how brilliant she is. You wonder whether the loud boy in the back understands that making everybody laugh may be the armor he wears because he has no idea who he is yet.

You wonder whether you are helping.

You wonder whether any of this matters.

And years later someone finds you in a grocery store.

Mr. So-and-so?

Mrs. So-and-so?

Do you remember me?

Of course the teacher usually remembers you.

Teachers remember everybody.

And then comes the sentence.

You probably don’t know this, but…

And suddenly a teacher discovers that the thing she said casually on a Wednesday afternoon in 1998 lodged permanently in another human heart.

You told me I could write. You told me I should try out for the team. You told me I wasn’t stupid. You told me I needed to stop making excuses. You told me God had given me something worth offering.

You told me I could become more.

There it is.

The secret curriculum.

Thomas Aquinas said that to love is to will the good of the other. Not to merely like the other. Not to indulge the other. Not to rescue the other from every difficulty.

To will their good.

That is teaching.

At its best, teaching is the daily, stubborn, exhausting practice of willing the good of someone who may not yet have the slightest interest in willing his own.

And in Catholic education this becomes something even deeper. Because the child in front of us is not simply a future worker. Not merely a test score. Not a data point. Not a college acceptance. Not a behavior problem. Not even merely a student.

He is a person made in the image and likeness of God.

She is an immortal soul.

A mystery.

A life entrusted, briefly, to another life.

The Catholic teacher stands before a classroom and participates in something almost sacramental: helping young people discover who they already are in the eyes of God.

Sometimes that happens through Augustine. Sometimes algebra. Sometimes sentence diagrams. Sometimes detention. Sometimes baseball. Sometimes a speech coach refusing to let a kid mumble his way through another mediocre paragraph because she suspects there is a voice hiding inside him that someday people may need to hear.

Teachers rarely know which moment matters.

That must be terribly frustrating.

And perhaps holy.

Because so much of teaching is planting trees beneath whose shade you may never sit. You teach. You hope. You pray. You repeat. You love.

Then the bell rings.

And they leave.

And eventually they grow up. They become nurses and plumbers and mothers and priests and electricians and accountants and soldiers and fathers and teachers and radio hosts who once threw books at perfectly innocent fourth-grade educators.

And somewhere inside them remain voices.

Stand up straight.

Try again.

Tell the truth.

You can do better.

Use your gifts.

Take responsibility.

I believe in you.

That last one may be the most powerful sentence in education.

I believe in you.

Because before most of us knew how to believe in ourselves, someone else lent us a little of their belief.

A teacher.

So as school begins again and classrooms fill with backpacks and nervous laughter and sharpened pencils that will mysteriously disappear by Thursday, perhaps we should say thank you.

Not the casual thank-you we give someone holding a door.

A real one.

Find a teacher. Maybe your child’s teacher. Maybe your teacher. Maybe the retired one whose name suddenly arrived in your heart while reading this. Write them. Call them. Stop them after Mass. Send the email. Tell the story. Tell them what you remember. Tell them what they saw. Tell them what became of the seed they planted.

Because teachers spend much of their lives wondering whether the seeds are growing.

And every now and then, someone ought to walk back into the field and say:

They did.

They are.

I am.

Thank you.