~ we would all have smiles on our faces~

The days that remain of this school year have dwindled down into the single digits.  By the time tomorrow morning rolls around, only 7 1/2 days will be left to go.  If ever there was a school year that flew by at record pace, then it would be the one from the year 2016-17.  For some reason, I thought it might last a little bit longer.

It did not.

I was doing a lesson last Friday at school in preparation for a blogpost that I wanted to write on the very last day of school.  I asked the kids to help me think of ideas that I could use.  In particular, I was asking them what they felt a successful school year would look like and sound like.  I asked them to think a moment about it and then jot down their thoughts on sticky notes.  Once they were finished, we would share them with the group.  Just as an aside here, I wish I would have been the inventor of sticky notes.  I have gone through about a gazillion of them this year in our classroom.

Once they were finished, they brought them up and affixed them to the board.  Then we started to go through them, one by one, to see what everyone had said.  I realized by the time I got to the fifth or sixth one, that this lesson was not going to turn out as I had planned.  Instead, it would go a different way and one that actually was very eye opening and quite telling.

You know, silly me.  I thought that they would give answers like "we all would do well on the state assessment" or "we all would do well enough to go on to the fourth grade next year".  I was looking for answers that pertained to how far they had advanced academically as third graders.  Not a one of them gave an answer that mentioned anything about academic achievement.  Their perception was so far removed from mine and as I read them, one by one, I began to see how wrong I had looked at things and how right those 21 kids were.

One response in particular stopped me dead in my tracks and it was one written with 8 simple words, ones that after I had read them, made all the sense in the world to me.  One sweet child had captured the essence of a successful classroom as only a 9-year old can.

She wrote,
"We would all have smiles on our faces!"

Isn't it amazing?  A child would measure success by how happy and content the children and adults would be, simply by the fact that they were smiling.  Sure they might be smiling because their state assessment came back mark "proficient" or their grade card reflected that they were now promoted to the fourth grade for next year.  But what about other reasons to smile? Surely there would be plenty and I am pretty sure that dear little one was referring to many of them.

I hope they smiled today when I dismissed the boys to line up and go to lunch and forgot that I'd left the girls sitting quietly at their desks wondering what in the world their teacher was doing.  Once the boys were outside they looked back and said "What about the girls?".  Perhaps they grinned when we had fun doing something totally unrelated to the lesson plans of the day as we threw caution to the wind and had fun for a change.  Maybe their faces were happy when they enjoyed a great lunch with their classmates or rode in the back of a bumpy old school bus on the way to a field trip nearby.  There are plenty of reasons to smile and I hope that I have given them many.

When I send them home next week on the last day of school, I will try to smile but deep inside I imagine that I will feel like crying a bit.  Those 21 kids were total strangers to me back in August when we first met one another.  It didn't take long to realize how much that I loved them all and for better or worse, to spend the next 9 months together.  We have had our share of bad days along with the good.  If I told you that it was easy all of the time, well that would not be the truth.  But it has surely been worth it.

To be a teacher in the state of Oklahoma can be challenging.  I'm not getting rich here but that doesn't even really matter because I never got into this business for the money in the first place. There was something far more valuable than a paycheck that I found as a teacher.  School funding goes by two names, "Slim" and "None".  Teachers in our district clean their own classrooms because there is not any money to pay a custodian.  We wear more than one hat and do so without grumbling. It's just what I have learned you do here and in a way, it has continued to refine my character to an even greater extent.  My job this year at Big Pasture has given me many things and I guess the greatest of these things is this.

I have 21 reasons to get up in the morning and even better yet, a whole lot of reasons to smile.