#education – Sittin' Ugly Sistahs

Just like everyone in the corporate world wants a corner office with widows, every school teacher wants the perfect classroom. Perfection is of course, according to the individual, but I can guarantee that every teacher wants a classroom with a working thermostat, the correct number of tables and desks, a filing cabinet that locks, and is in close proximity to the restrooms.

My career in education lasted thirty-six years, seven of which were teaching kindergarten. During my seven years in kindergarten, I was lucky enough to have the perfect room two years in a row. Room 102 was the most coveted room of the school and had not even come available until the tenured teacher who inhabited that room finally retired.

Even though I’m pretty sure it was luck, I felt like royalty the minute I found out I would be moving into room 102. It was like Kensington Palace and The Taj Mahal met Clifton Park Elementary School. I felt like the Queen, or at very least, a lottery winner.

As you stood in front of the school, it appeared to be in L shape. My classroom, number 102, was the second room at the beginning of the L. By school standards, it was spacious. My classroom had one whole wall of windows with a wide window sill and bookshelves underneath. The windows looked out onto the front of the building, and we could see the flagpole, and every visitor who parked and walked into the front office. The light coming in from the windows was so fantastic that I rarely had to turn on those loud, garish fluorescent lights.

Room 102 had a wall full of closet storage opposite the bank of windows and shared a boys and girls restroom with classroom 101. Our rooms were close to the cafeteria, easy outside access for fire drills, close to the custodian’s closet for those accidental accidents, and close to the outside door for recess. For a kindergarten teacher this is prime real estate on the boardwalk of life.

I had big plans for room 102 and the huge window sills. During the spring seed unit, I could envision twenty lima bean seeds, planted in Dixie cups, lining the sill. My students would have the tallest sprouts, and every child’s plant would grow with all of the natural light. Spring seed unit would be every child’s favorite, and I would be smug knowing our classroom ruled!

In the fall when the firemen came to teach us ‘stop, drop, and roll,’ we would be the first classroom to see the fire engine pull into the parking lot. In fact, when anyone arrived or left school we could potentially be the first to know.

However, in life there is a yin for every yang, and a pro for every con, and room 102 turned out to be such a contradiction. If room 102 could talk, it would remember the day Mrs. Flintcraft parked her big, peach colored Buick in front of the school to bring her son’s forgotten lunch box. She parked and hopped out of the car and as she walked down the long sidewalk, past the flagpole, and into the building; five other students and I, who were in my reading circle, saw that Mrs. Flintcraft had the back of her yellow, spring dress tucked into her pantyhose, exposing all of her goods, so to speak.

My reading center was a horseshoe shaped table with five chairs.

I glanced at my five ‘readers’ and all of us had wide, surprised eyes.

“Her underwear is showing,” one little girl reported.

“It sure is,” I said. “Maybe I should go tell her.”

And about that time, Mrs. Flintcraft came back out of the front door, down the sidewalk, past the flagpole, to her car with her yellow spring dress untucked.

“I think someone told her,” another student said. And we all got back on task.

The allure of classroom 102 and being close to the front office, wore off pretty fast. I realized the principal liked to pop by with visitors wanting a tour of the school. I would look up during a lesson, and my principal would be standing in the doorway with a school board member or a parent. “Do you mind if we observe for a little while?” he would ask.

“Of course not. Come on in.” I would say, while I silently prayed I could keep my twenty, five-year-olds under some semblance of control.

“Organized chaos!” my principal would say. “Your classroom is so much fun to visit.”

My dream of the superior lima bean plants disappeared one Monday when we arrived at school to find half of the plants had grown too much and toppled over, while the other half burned up because of too much sun. Upon this terrible discovery there were many tears, questions, and meltdowns. The wall of windows turned out to be too much heat for our delicate seeds and we had to start over, which meant planting seeds during the spring farm animal unit. I was losing momentum.

Have I mentioned the ant farm? Let me say that sometimes a five-year-old is not as responsible as we might wish. Sometimes little fingers touch things or move things and do not put them back. Like the top of the ant farm. On our classroom chore list, one item is labeled: Ant Farmer. The Ant Farmer is to check the ant farm every day to make sure everything is running smoothly. No escaping ants, no dying ants, etc. However, one day..

“Teacher!! Come quick! Somebody took the lid off and didn’t put it on all the way. The ants are gone!” my Ant Farmer said.

“Maybe they are sleeping or hiding in the dirt,” I suggested.

“I don’t think so,” another student said. “I see them going out the window. See? Look! Our ants are lining up to go outside!”

My first instinct was to grab the bug spray, but I knew this might be a delicate situation, so we built a suspension bridge out of popsicle sticks and lured the line of ants, or what was left of them, back into their glass farmhouse.

I made a vow to myself that next year I would try a worm farm instead of ants.

That outside door that was so near our classroom became a source of contention. We could hear all the classrooms going out to recess and coming in from recess. At various times during the day, we could hear that heavy, metal door clink shut. It was just a reminder that someone was having recess, and we weren’t.

The huge wall of windows that I loved so much were hard to cover when we were showing a film strip. They were drafty in the winter and smoldering in the spring. And as much as we enjoyed looking out at the comings and goings of the school…they enjoyed looking in on us. Occasionally we would look up to kids waving to us from outside. Or we would see the face of an older sibling pressed flat into the window looking for their brother or sister.

There were good days and bad days in room 102 but by and large I did feel like a rock star for those two years. I was living the dream, challenging young minds, creating a strong foundation for learning, and I had a room with a view. It doesn’t get much better than that.

“Repite, por favor.”

“Senorita?”

I heard my professor tap into the headset asking me to repeat the phrase that was just spoken on the tape we were listening to.

“Senorita, verme despues de clase.”

See me after class.

For some unknown reason, I advanced placed out of two Spanish classes from high school and landed in a second year Novella class in which I did not belong. Because I had sailed through high school with little studying, I was ill-prepared to keep up with this high-level Spanish class at Baylor University.

I slithered into the Professor’s office after class, and he wasted no time:

“Senorita? I will let you withdraw passing if you will just get out of my class. You simply cannot continue.”

His chair-side manner would never win a compassion award. He offered no remediation or helpful guidance, as I was evidently slowing him down.

“But my major. What about my major? I wanted to be a Spanish interpreter and travel the world.”

“Oh, Dios mio! No Miss. You must not continue.”

“Ok.” I said, “But, what do I need to do now?”

“Just go. I’ll take care of the withdrawal.”

And so, I went back to my dorm room to pour over the curriculum courses trying to find a new major. Becoming a Spanish interpreter and traveling the world was no longer an option. How do you say, ‘end of the line,’ in Spanish?

Because I had learned to sew with my grandma growing up, I thought I could be a fashion designer, which sounded as exotic as a Spanish interpreter. I did love fashion and as far as I knew I would not have to take any foreign language, so it seemed the perfect fit. I called my daddy that next weekend to tell him my news and shockingly it did not go the way I predicted. I explained the Spanish class situation and that I withdrew with a passing and not a failure. Then I told him my grand plan to become a fashion designer and see the world.

“No, you will absolutely not become a fashion designer,” he said.

“But Daddy…” I interrupted.

“No buts. The only acceptable majors are teaching, or nursing. That way, if your husband dies later in life, you will have a career to fall back on.”

“But, Daddy, a fashion designer is a career.”

“Nancy Lynn, you need to become a teacher or a nurse, marry a nice, educated man when you graduate, be a stay-at-home mom and live happily ever after. That’s what you need to do unless you want to start paying your own tuition and then you can waste your own money on fashion designing. Comprende’?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“O.K. honey, get this taken care of as soon as possible. Love you.”

“Love you, too, Daddy.”

My exciting idea about fashion designing morphed into a Bachelor of Science degree in Home Economics. My certificate would allow me to teach grades 8-12 Home Economics and Science: and also, Kindergarten. And although I had never ever, even once thought about being a teacher, it seemed that was my best option.

In my junior year at Baylor I met and fell in love with a law school student who was also a widower, ten years my senior and had a six-year-old daughter. We fell for each other in lightning speed and got married six months after our first date. “We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout!” as Johnny Cash would have said.

His mother had been a teacher, so he was as happy about my teaching certificate as Daddy was. We got married before my senior year, and Daddy even agreed to finish paying my tuition as long as I graduated at the end of the year, and that is exactly what I did.

After my graduation, my ‘then’ husband still had two more semesters of law school, so we decided that our daughter, Lee, and I would move back to his hometown of Killeen, Texas and I would apply for teaching jobs. My interview with the Killeen Independent School District happened to be the same day we drove from Waco pulling a U-Haul trailer. Sixty-one miles of pulling a trailer and entertaining a six-year-old left me a little less than fresh as I pulled up to the Human Resources building,(trailer and all) and after a short introduction, I was told to head straight over to the junior high school.

“Go on over to the junior high and I’ll call the Principal to expect you. This could be your lucky day,” the Human Resource Director said.

When we arrived at the junior high, Lee and I went into the front office, and I introduced myself to the secretary.

“Mr. Lawson is expecting you. Your daughter can wait out here with me if you like,” she said.

The school was old and definitely across the railroad tracks. I just didn’t know if it was on the right or wrong side of those tracks. And since Killeen, Texas was near Fort Hood army base, I knew there would be a large population of military children attending the school.

Before I knew it, Mr. Lawson came out and introduced himself to me and Lee.

“Be good, sweetie, and I will be back soon,” I said to Lee and sat her in a chair by the counter in the front office.

Mr. Lawson and I had polite chit chat and he asked questions about my teaching philosophy. I had no philosophy about teaching or anything else, really. I was barely twenty-two years old and well, quite frankly, I thought this teaching gig would be a breeze.

Five minutes into our interview we heard ‘click click, likity tickity, click, click.’ We continued talking but when the clicking sound kept on he said, “Maybe we better check on your little one.” Opening his office door we saw Lee, singing softly to herself and tap dancing on the freshly waxed office floor. The secretary clapped and cheered, “Bravo!” and Mr. Lawson turned to me saying, “Well, I have to offer you the job now after a performance like that! School starts in two weeks, what do you say?”

“Yes,” I said hugging Lee. And just like that I moved to a new city, with a new family and a new career.

I became a teacher, something I never aspired to be or dreamed of being. It was by default from a Spanish Professor who wanted me out of his class as much as I wanted to be out. It was a life decision I fell into by sheer chance and because my daddy had a vision of what a woman should and should not do. Was it luck? Would you call it fate? Both sound too romantic for what it really was, happenstance.

I became a teacher, averaging way more than the “forty hours a week and summers off,” that a few foolish people believe is true. My heart was captivated by the sometimes hopeful, sometimes hopeless faces I would meet each year. Come August, I planned to do better than the year before and create an atmosphere of learning and respect, and each May I looked forward to time away from the constant responsibility and work, which is teaching. It was a rhythm I would repeat for thirty-six years.

In 1990-91 I taught Kindergarten at Clear Creek Elementary School on Fort Hood army base in Killeen, Texas. The Gulf War had just started when we began school that year and what I remember most are the children and mothers crying each morning as they separated for the day. In my classroom, our main windows faced the highway, and right next to the highway were the railroad tracks. The trains ran all day and all-night loading and unloading equipment, tanks, and personnel and often my twenty-five little charges would be gathered three deep looking out the window hoping to see their mothers or daddies.

“Come away from the window now,” I would say. “Let’s read a book.”

“But I think I see my daddy,” one child would say, and the rest would press close, hoping for a glimpse.

Our school was on high alert and the MP’s (Military Police) were positioned by the doors while nearly every day a young mother would come to check out her children in hopes of moving back home where they could be near family. It was a chaotic year, yet one I felt most honored to be a part of. I felt my calling to not only teach these children but also to love and nurture them, providing a safe, calm oasis during their otherwise stressful days.

As time went on, I became the kind of teacher I could be proud of. I became a teacher with a heart. A heart for students from all walks of life, backgrounds, and nationalities. A heart for loving the hard to love and a heart to bring discipline to a troubled spirit. I enjoyed each grade level, each school, and each role I played from Kindergarten teacher to Assistant Principal of a large high school. The job requirements might change but the essence of a teacher stays the same. Connection.

This connection changed my life in a million different ways, all better than I could have ever imagined. My heart learned when to be tough and when to be tender. My patience grew by leaps and bounds as eventually, I became exactly what I was always meant to be.

A teacher.