In the days, weeks, months, and very few years that I have left to be a teacher, there is one message that I wish to relay to all educators out there. It won't matter who you are, where or what you teach, or even if you have been in the classroom a few years or nearly 40 of them like me.
The message is for you and it is for me as well.
It is this.
You can be the best teacher there ever was. Your students can all score exemplary on any state assessment they are given. Hey, you can even be chosen the "teacher of the year" or the century for that matter. Your classroom may well be the most impeccably kept up place in the entire building with not a thing out of place. The state standards can be posted all over the walls and memorized within your brain. Yet none of this is as important as the one thing I find the most crucial in reaching all children.
You need to go where they are sometimes.
And you need to go there often.
I cannot recall the number of children over the past four decades who have come through my classroom doors with something on their minds that had absolutely nothing to do with my lesson plans for the day. It could be as simple as being very hungry because they got up too late to eat breakfast or even worse yet, that there was no food in their house to eat in the first place. Many a time there has been a sad look on the face of some child whose cat or dog had been run over or disappeared during the night. Too often it seems, students have lost close family members, folks who meant the world to them. With tears in their eyes, they only wanted to be able to tell me about it and how sad it made them feel. They knew I couldn't bring their pets or loved ones back but they knew I would listen.
That was all they needed.
As teachers, we expect kids to come to us every day ready to learn anything we set before them. We just kind of figure that our lesson plans are sufficient enough to provide them with what they need. I have learned over the course of the last 40 years that it is not enough to provide them with. There is something missing if we omit one important detail.
We have to go to where they are sometimes.
And we have to go there often.
I'm a firm believer in paying home visits to see kids and to interact with their families. It's important because you see, the classroom is not the only place a kid can learn these days. Only a foolish teacher would believe that children only gain knowledge within the confines of the schoolroom walls. Some of the greatest of relationships between a teacher and her students/families can be built elsewhere. It might be in the parking lot of the local grocery store or at the library on a Sunday afternoon. You just might find it in a pig barn where kids are getting ready to show their animals on a Saturday morning or on the football or soccer field some Friday night.
Going to where the kids are is sometimes not easy. Perhaps it is even an inconvenience at times but that should never stop you. I will always believe that if you really want to reach a child, to make a connection that will last for a long time to come, you simply have to do one thing.
Teachers have to go to where the students are.
And we have to go there often.
The sunset was beautiful last evening near the small Oklahoma town of Wilson.
Our school is getting ready to have a father-daughter dance on the last day of February. Young ladies will have the chance to have a nice meal and dance with some very special men in their lives. I'm happy to know that several girls in my third grade classroom are going. I have smiled to see the looks on their faces when they describe what they will wear and what it will feel like to dance with their father.
I never did dance with mine.
Not even once.
My dad has been gone from this earth for such a long time now. I am already two years older than he was when passed. I'm now the old person that I once thought he was, and the truth is my dad and I weren't/aren't so old after all. You kind of change your perspective on things like that as time goes on.
I was very fortunate to have grown up on a farm just outside the town of Haven, Kansas. My dad was gone 4-5 months of the year sometimes when he was on the harvest circuit. We watched him leave out in early May and never saw him come back again until the wheat was cut in North Dakota in mid-September. Growing up was just that way. We got used to it and knew that he was doing what he wanted to do.
I was glad that the year I graduated from high school, my father postponed leaving with all of his equipment until the day after my graduation in May of 1973. He usually would have never considered doing that. Crops that are ripe in the field have a need to be harvested but somehow or another, he figured out a way to be there the night I got my high school diploma. I think it was the best present that I ever got from anyone.
It was the gift of his presence.
I never did dance with my father, but once he walked me down the aisle. The late fall of 1976 seems like such a long time ago. Daddy had never worn a tuxedo in all of his life and when I asked if he would consider doing that for me, I was afraid he would say no. Instead, he agreed to and I couldn't believe it. When I saw him standing there getting ready to walk me down the aisle, I felt such love for him in my heart. He never wore another tuxedo again and nearly 6 years later, he died from lung cancer at age 59.
I never did dance with my father, but on the very last harvest run that he ever did I got the chance to go along and spend the entire summer with him. Getting to be with my dad helped me to see just how hard he had been working all of those years before. I watched him exhibit the kinds of character traits that I wanted for myself and for the children that I would some day become a mother to. He was hard working, kind, considerate, a man of integrity and so much more.
Even though I never danced with him, I felt a real sense of closeness to my father throughout my life. I have wonderful memories of him that will last until my own last day. Once when I was 20 years old, I cut off my long hair. Probably 12 inches came off at the beauty salon and I worried what he might say about it. He loved my hair long like that and I was sure that he might not approve. When I got home, I quickly went into the house and decided to make a beeline for my bedroom upstairs. I never even made it past the first step before I heard his voice say....
"Peggy Ann, come here a minute. What did you do to your hair?"
He was not near as disappointed as I thought he would be
On Tuesday night while all of the girls at school are making enough memories with someone to last them a lifetime, I will be standing there watching them and remembering my own father. Even though we never danced together, I feel like he would have said yes if only I had asked him.
I was only 28 when he died and now, 33 years later one thing is for certain.
I love and miss him still.
I hope that he would be proud of the young girl he once knew.
A sweet child asked me the other day if I went to school during the Great Depression. Really, he did. I replied that I am a bit older than he is but I'm not quite old enough by a long ways to say that I was a product of that horrible time in American memory.
You would have to call me a child of the "Cold War" or something.
I've been going to school now since early September of 1960. By my figuring that makes about 57 years of learning, first as a student and then as a teacher. Oh how the times have changed, again and again over the course of the last nearly 6 decades. It's hard to imagine just how far we have traveled in education and every once in a while it comes to mind for me.
My beginning as a lifelong learner was when I started kindergarten at age 4. I didn't turn to the ripe old age of 5 until nearly Halloween that year. My teacher, Miss Marmont, had 30 of us to "kid wrangle". She did it all by herself without the aid of technology or teacher aides or anything else that we are spoiled by in the classroom today. I don't believe I ever saw that sainted woman take a bathroom break or a coffee break or any kind of break for that matter during the entire school year. She just smiled and kept on teaching. Miss Marmont always wore ruby red lipstick and matching fingernail polish, without a hair in her perfectly coiffed hairstyle out of place.
Josephine Marmont never married or had children of her own. Once I remember her telling my classmates and I that she did have kids and they were us.
She loved us kids and we loved her.
That little tiny girl wearing the plaid dress on the front row right never once figured she would be a teacher. Hey, she was just having fun playing with her friends and wondering if all the cute boys would chase the girls at recess. Life was simple then. Your school supplies consisted of a box of 8 jumbo crayons, a couple of fat pencils that were supposed to last a long time, some paste, and if you were lucky a pair of little scissors. We didn't bring any kleenex to school and if a guy had to blow their nose, well you just got toilet paper out of the bathroom. It was a simple time and I regret now that kids can't experience that today.
During my grade school and high school years, I just kept learning. Still I had no notion that I would ever be a teacher. Not one. I was interested in other things, most of which had nothing to do with my life in the future. Even during my first semester in college I had no inkling at all of what might lie ahead for me. During the winter of my freshman year at a small and private Mennonite College back in Kansas, I finally decided that I wanted to be a teacher.
Becoming an educator was exactly what I did. Since August of 1979 back home in Haven, Kansas I have been a teacher in one teaching assignment or another. After nearly 40 years of doing this, I have taught just about everything that I would have desired to. Half of my career was spent at the small Old Order Amish school in Yoder, Kansas. I learned how to teach two grades at once while at Yoder Grade School and enjoyed my time in the combined 1st and 2nd grade classroom there. I have taught in Kansas. Colorado, Texas and now Oklahoma. My desire is to make it one more year in order to achieve my longtime goal of 4 decades in the classroom.
Time will tell and surely only the good Lord above knows what will happen. One thing I know for certain and will attest to for the rest of the days of my life.
I was born to be a teacher. How thankful I am that I listened to and followed the great plan set out for my life. Even in everything, I have never once looked back.
Some of the best times of my life have been spent with children.
I teach in a very small school. It's so small that we can put all the students, Pre-K through 12th grade in the same area on the high school gym floor. I know we can because Friday we did just that.
Somewhere there in the first quarter of the front of this picture, sit "the 20". Amidst a sea of red, those young people that are mine to teach each day are doing something that they will always remember. I'm telling you the same thing that I have said a thousand times before and that is this.
They probably won't remember in the years to come every single thing I taught them, nor would I expect them to. They will remember the fun things we did like taking this picture with all of the other kids. When it is all said and done, why wouldn't this be among the most important?
I haven't written in this blog much during the month of February. I started and stopped at least a dozen times. Much has been on my mind, including of course the upcoming state assessments in April. We have worked so hard, put in so much time and effort. It weighs heavy on all of our minds. I have been so busy trying to make sure that we all pass our part of them, that I've lost sight of the little things that make a classroom a real classroom.
Friday morning I was reminded of that very fact.
I was talking to the kids about how important it will be in the days and weeks ahead to not waste a moment of time. There is so much to do and every day that goes by is one less day that we have. I admonished them one more time to not give up and to keep trying to do their best no matter what.
Then it happened. A young boy sitting close to where I was standing said something that made me stop in my tracks.
"That would be kind of like your brother Mrs. Renfro. You know, the time that he didn't quit when he was running that race?"
I couldn't believe that anyone remembered. Back in September, I had told them the story of my brother Mike who passed away in 2007 from ALS/Lou Gehrig's disease. I shared a story with the kids about the time when Mike decided that he was going to run in a race back in Wichita, Kansas. He wasn't in the best of shape as a matter of fact, my brother was in about as bad a shape as a guy could want to be and still run the race. It didn't matter. His goal was to finish the race, even if he was dead last, before they turned the race clock off.
And for the record, he did.
Just barely but he did.
For that young man to have remembered that particular story told to him months ago, and to have made a personal connection to it in regards to doing his best on the state assessment, touched my heart. I didn't cry although I can't believe I didn't. I called him over to me and thanked him for remembering someone very dear to me.
I've been sick at home for the past two days, succumbing to whatever awful virus is floating around our part of the world this time. I have slept these past two days away and now it is time to prepare for the upcoming week at school. A pile of work waits for me in the spare bedroom and it's time for me to face it. I'll be making sure that the lion's share of my plans revolve around preparation for the reading and math tests that lie in wait for us in about 8 weeks more.
But you know what?
I'm going to be sure that somewhere tucked deep into those lesson plans, not once but many times over, will be some small life lesson that kids can recollect in the years to come. I am just about positive that most of them will care less in the years ahead what the difference is between an acute angle and an obtuse one. (For the record, I'm the teacher and I can't tell you the last time I worried about it.) But when the time comes that they are faced with the prospect of giving up when something gets too difficult for them, those young people just might remember about the time their teacher told them about a man named Mike Scott who took pride in finishing a race.
Before the clock was shut off.
Mike Scott was a great man and the best of brothers a kid sister could ask for. He would be happy to know that his story would help to teach a lesson of life to twenty third graders at Big Pasture School in Randlett, Oklahoma.
And once it was August and we had all the time in the world ahead of us. In the beginning they were "the 19" and on the first day of school we stood outside together and smiled for the camera. We would gather as a group for our picture many times after this one. Each time I would notice that they were just a little more grown up.
It would be easy to have a tear well up in my eye. I have grown to love each of them very much.
The school year has gone by too quickly and like a mother begging for time to slow down a bit in order to enjoy her babies more, I too am asking for the days to stop flying by. Not only do I have a whole lot more to teach, especially before the state assessments arrive, I just want to have some time to enjoy those boys and girls. I want to do some fun things as I listen to the sound of their voices and the laughter that only they can provide.
Now it is February and for all intents and purposes, tomorrow will be May 19th. The older I have become, the faster each school year has gone by. 39 years have come and gone now. Each class I have received has been a blessing to me and this one is no exception. We have grown and changed each day. The knowledge we have attained has been great but perhaps the greatest thing we have learned is this.
In our struggles and triumphs, we have found how very important it is to stick together and to leave no one behind.
Not ever.
They are now "the 20" and I hope that when it is all said and done, I will have made a difference in their lives. We are working so hard to try and be ready for the state assessments. Sometimes it gets pretty stressful for all concerned, students and teacher alike. Today I took them aside after we had spent a marathon 30 minutes reviewing the associative property of multiplication. I sat them in front of me and asked them to listen.
And they did.
I told them I was sorry that everything seems to revolve around testing. I reminded them that I knew how hard they had been working. You know, I told those kids that I wish that people could see how far they have really come this year and absolutely none of that gain has anything to do with a test score. They listened and they understood. Children are quite good at understanding.
The days that remain shall quickly pass us by and soon our time together will be a memory. My goal from day #1 was for them to be able to say at year's end that third grade was the best year they ever had. Perhaps they shall forget some of the things that I taught them. I do hope that they remember some of the life lessons that were mine to share with them. In the years that lie ahead, even if they forget everything else, my hope is that they remember one thing.
I hope they remember that once there was a teacher named Mrs. Renfro and that she loved them all very much.
