The Start of Something…

The best compliment ever given to me by an administrative supervisor at work went something like this: “you know Rachael, teaching is an art, and you are an artist.” 

This is a bit of a brag maybe, but really, most of us in the profession know this to be true. Impactful teaching is an art form. It wasn’t so much that this was new information that I felt humbled and stunned by the words of praise. It was more that in this recognition I felt seen and respected for the variables I met with in my work and the way in which I handled them. 

An artist sees their work with fresh eyes each time they come upon it. They observe. They change. They feel the balance or imbalance. They perceive the changes that need to be made. They sit with the work, revising, intuitively adding or subtracting, giving or taking. They become one with the art. To some end, there is a blur where the artist leaves off and the art begins. In the orchestrated chaos of a classroom, this can also be true. 

As a teacher, the art moves all around you: in lessons, discussion, pain, failure, success, triumph, trauma, setbacks and breakthroughs. I have danced this dance. I have painted this scene. I have sung this song. I have captured the still life, and flung paint against the canvas in abstract frustration. I have created art. 

In this process, for eighteen years in a very diverse selection of educational settings, I have collected memories. Some have stayed with me, sharp and clear as the day they happened, some fading into the background of the collective experience that guides my intuition in this profession. The memories are stories within themselves of my life intertwining, connecting, diverging with other lives; with people that have educated me, while I sought to educate them.

My work in this life so far is a composite of the stories I keep. I have started the process of unraveling them from my mind and trying to find an order and rhythm to them. I am working on expressing them in writing, a recollection of the moments that have defined my career so far. This is therapy of sorts as I find myself sinking, grasping in a profession that is sometimes thankless and often exhausting. My spirit is tired, but it’s not ready for rest. It is in search of refreshment, and so the memories keep coming to me at night, as I lay in bed waiting for sleep. I am dreaming them, thinking them, and piecing them together, trying to hear their messages and the lessons left to learn. 

This is why I have started to write them down, and why I aim to collect many of them into a final composition. I have just started this journey, but I think there is something here. Here is the first in a long list of memories, beginning back eighteen years ago, when I first learned that some kids have to run from their homes, and sometimes that means leaving their homework behind:

Priorities 

She slept at the residential facility with other teenage girls, on a single cot, with starched sheets and pillows.  Every morning, she rode thirty minutes on the school bus, just like all of the other students at the school. They came from far away to the little school on top of the hill; nestled in a safe spot, removed from the chaos of their lives. Backpacks on their backs, weighted down not from books and packed lunches, but from trauma baggage that they carried to and fro, not sure of where to leave it, or how to. Inside the school:  two rooms with padded walls for bad days, teachers with special credentials and years of grit, projectors and pencils, specialists, psychologists, and me. I was twenty two, and just landed a full time job after a degree in English left me wondering how employable I actually would ever be. The official title was “Teaching Assistant”.  The unofficial titles were something more like: escort to the bathroom, verifier of bad news, carrier of paraphernalia on the way to the office, whipping post, hugger, receiver of verbal lashings and physical thrashings, carer of feelings. 

She slept at the residential facility with the other teenage girls until she went back home to sleep in the apartment with the mother that needed more care than her. One morning at school, she yelled and kicked and screamed and wept. I walked with her to the room meant for calming down. Sometimes she felt better after hitting the pads on the walls. Maybe she  would sit down to rest after a little while and the blanket of exhaustion would calm the fire inside. 

But her rage jumped out of her body in shrieks and screams instead. Her deep brown eyes held on to mine with intensity as she stood inches from my face. Homework would have to wait. Finding safety from her home had to be the priority the night before. I held her in a sharp hug as she coughed her tears free.