Teaching

When a teacher stops learning they stop teaching. I firmly believe that, as a teacher, our own learning never ceases. I also believe that our own teaching must extend far beyond the confines of our own classroom and into the lives of our students.

Teachers are role models. We have the greatest opportunity to influence the lives of many young people by our actions. Students need to realize that we, too, make mistakes, but our ability to admit and many times apologize sets a tone for honesty and integrity and honesty. We need to instill in students that failure is not a defeat, but the challenge to learn and improve.

These quotes come from the local paper, and are from my old band director, who is retiring at the end of this school year. They stood out for me in a really personal way, which is probably the same way they stood out for any number of her former students.

The summer before ninth grade officially began was when I went to my first marching band camp, and it didn’t go well for me. I couldn’t really get a handle on the quick, small steps required to glide-step, which now seems really stupid to say because, duh, you just take quick, small, heel-to-toe steps. But it was hard for me. I was so bad at marching that I had to be taken aside to do what was essentially a remedial on glide-stepping. That was too much for me to handle because I hate being singled out and looking like a fool so I faked feeling as though I was going to pass out - which had happened previously in the week, so there was precedent - and went to the band room, where I sat on the floor and cried, which was completely normal reaction to have.

The band director walked in soon after and we talked, had a conversation which eventually turned into me having what amounted to a nervous breakdown. She listened patiently. When I was done, she told me some truths about myself, how I set such high expectations for myself and how, when I fail to meet those expectations, that doesn’t mean I am a failure. She talked about how this is how we learn and grow, and how we never stop learning, how we learn something new everyday. She paused then to think about what she had discovered that day, then told me she had learned how to operate some of the lights in the auditorium.

Soon after the rest of the band trooped in for lunch, and I joined them. My friends asked me if I was feeling okay. I said, “yeah.”

I wrote about that experience, indirectly, the first week of that school year. Our writing assignment in English was to orient in on how we felt on the first day of school, and then write about that feeling. The following week we had our first reading assignment, Tim O’Brien’s “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.” It felt real, unlike anything I had read previously, just like how my teacher, Ms. J, was unlike anyone I had met until then.

Ms. J had dark brown hair that fell around her chain, like a bob, giving her this illusion of youth although the lines around her mouth would tell anyone otherwise. She had a skeleton tattooed on her wrist, and always wore long sleeves because of it. Sometimes the sleeves would ride up and you could catch a glimpse of the bones or the guitar it was playing.

She had chosen “ambivalent” as her emotion for the first day of school. I had never heard that word before. She had just transferred to my school from an alternative high school, and talked about how, although she loved to teach, she sometimes hated the bullshit that comes with the profession.

When it came time to discuss “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” Ms. J went through structure of it, but she also tried to get us to dig into the story, to form and understand an experience with the text. It was, I realize now, the first time I truly asked myself, “why?”

Most of my classmates didn’t like Ms. J.

Rat would go on like that until Mitchell Sanders couldn’t tolerate it any longer. It offended his inner ear.

“The story,” Sanders would say. “The whole tone, man, you’re wrecking it.”

“Tone?”

“The sound. You need to get a consistent sounds, like slow or fast, funny or sad. All these digressions, they just screw up your story’s sound. Stick to what happened.”

- from the “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.”

I loved, very much so, Ms. J, in that innocent and somewhat meaningless way you love when you’re in school. She was like my band director in the sense that it felt like they had both flipped that switch on the back of my head and then spun me around, and when things returned to focus I was seeing different worlds, worlds that, in turn, opened up my own.

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