One recent morning I came to school early to work on the lessons I did not do over the weekend. Thirty minutes before the students arrived, I was almost finished and was creating a real-life example for the students to investigate. Pleased with my progress, and determined to complete a perfect final product, I barely noticed when Chris walked in.
Chris isn’t my student this year, but I had him last year. I often have students from years past stopping by to visit, wanting to tell me about their summers, begging for me to talk to the counselor and arrange for them to be in one of my classes this year. Every seat in all of my classes is taken. It’s an incredible compliment as a teacher to have full classes of students who requested your course.
I sighed when I saw Chris come in. It’s not that I wasn’t happy to see him, but I was in a hurry and knew that I had few minutes to spare. But I smiled and greeted him and asked him how his summer was. “It was ok,” he told me, “we had a death in the family.” I was distracted, looking at my computer screen, and I completely missed his point. I heard his words, but I missed their meaning. I told him, “Oh I’m sorry to hear that,” or something of that sort. I figured his great aunt had died. We made some more small talk, but I was only half listening, I was finishing my lessons. I barely looked up when he left, but I told him to come back and visit me again soon.
Later when I had time to think about it, it occured to me that Chris is a 16 year-old boy, and boys that age don’t tell you about a death in the family if it’s a great aunt. They don’t mention the death of a great aunt if you ask them about their summers, and they certainly don’t stop by a teacher’s room to talk about it. What Chris was trying to tell me was that his older brother, the only positive male influence he’d ever known had died last week, and he was not doing well with it, and it felt surreal to be back at school and had him questioning at age 16 the type of man he wanted to grow up to be. He told all of that to the next teacher he went to visit that morning.
I was so busy working on the “perfect lesson” that I missed what was really important right in front of me. Years ago when I was a new teacher I was good at running a classroom and had good rapport with my students but was blissfully unaware of things like dwindling state test scores, the need for instruction to accommodate different learning styles, pacing guides, differentiated instruction, reading across the curriculum, “best practice”, and discovery based learning. My lessons were not good–heck I didn’t even plan lessons, I stood by the overhead and showed the kids how to do math. But I was fun and energetic, and I was present with my kids every day.
Chris will be fine. He’s resilient in that way that some kids are. I saw him laughing and wrestling with a friend in the hall later that week. But I missed an opportunity I won’t get back. But there will be more. More students stopping by after school, before school, over lunch. There will be break-ups with boyfriends and girlfriends, fights with friends, fights with parents, and maybe some even bigger things. And next time whatever work I have to do will just have to wait.
