Reflections (fueled by airplane travel)

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,

And that object became a part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,

Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

-Walt Whitman

I found these words in the first pages of a book my sister gave me, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, a book I’m hoping will profoundly impact my life as an educator.

Old Walt’s words made me think of something I’ve often thought about, now that I’m a transmitter rather than a receiver, taking in the view from the other side of the desk.

When I think back to my memories of school, say first and fifth grades, I notice that they are patchy and incomplete. If you think about the total number of hours I logged behind desks and in front of chalkboards, I feel like the majority of that time is unaccounted for in the annals of my mind. Any concrete memories exist only as moments: brief flashes; random pictures; moving images like a film clip, repeating the same motions again and again in perpetuity. They exist also as pinpricks of feeling – shame, fascination, frustration or pride – blunted by time but still recognizable…

As a first grader at a public school in Brooklyn in 1990 or so, I remember being completely perplexed and befuddled by the big yellow clock Mrs. G--- was using to teach us to tell time (notably, the exact same model I used some two decades later to perplex and befuddle my first graders on the topic.)

I recall chasing classmates through the schoolyard in a never-ending game of tag, and finding little colorful plastic pieces that I later discovered were related in some vague and fearful way to “drugs.”

I can remember sitting in class, twisting and twisting a tenacious loose tooth that later became referred to by my family as “the snaggle-tooth;” being confounded by the effort of trying to distinguish my left from my right as I muddled through the Pledge of Allegiance; and the exact moment in kindergarten when I discovered I could tie my own shoe.

Fast-forwarding into my awkward adolescence, I can remember seeing my unusually tall fifth grade teacher climbing out of her tiny Volkswagen Rabbit, and her telling us about warm-fuzzies and Random Acts of Kindness (concepts which have, in diluted form, trickled down into my current classroom). I can remember building a model geyser out of crayon wax with my Best Friend and her mom for the science fair; pinching pinch pots and a racing to complete Cloze passages (I never could get ahead of that brainy Angela); staring at beige flecks in the green linoleum floor; being amazed by my math teacher’s rubber chicken. A moment of horror and shame and also mercy when I realized that the teacher knew that I was the one who had made that mess on the floor by picking the black rubber off my shoes, but had chosen to let it pass with a wink and a knowing smile.

I suppose there are lots more things tucked away in the folds of my brain that I could dredge up if I had a reason to, though separate times and places tend to blend themselves together in the swirl of memory. But my point is, when you are in school, it seems all-consuming and permanent. The current iteration of your life is the only one you could possibly conceive of.

And yet, in the fog of time, what really sticks? What do you really remember from these formative years?

Nothing of consequence it would seem… the color of the floor? Crayon-wax geysers and rubber chickens? Shoelaces and snaggle-teeth? Why are those the things I remember, and not something more, you know…important? (Or maybe, if I thought about it, I’d figure out reasons why those things were important after all.)

I don’t get to choose what my students will ultimately remember, and neither do they. I realize that my school memories don’t actually revolve around my teachers very much at all, though I know I must’ve learned a great deal from them. And if I were to tell any of my little memories to my former teachers, I doubt they’d have any recollection of them, as by now I’m sure they’ve been absorbed into the vast spongy recesses of time.

I suppose that, if you start out kind of as a lump of clay, the teachers you encounter all have a hand in subtly and slowly shaping whatever it is you eventually become. It may be hard to distinguish one teacher’s influence from another, and the process of molding and shaping happens so gradually that maybe you don’t even realize it’s happening at all. (Until you wake up one day a quarter-century later or more, and look down and say to yourself, hey! Will ya look at that – I have a shape! I’m something!)

The scary part as a teacher and molder of clay-lumps is knowing that every kid has these moments that will stick with them – the ones that will remain very, very clear forever, like flies in amber. I know there will be certain things they will always remember, but what’s unsettling is that I have no way of knowing what they will be!

When my students are writing the stories of their lives in years to come, if they have occasion to look back on their moments in 5-315, I can only hope that I will be remembered in my kinder and gentler and more forgiving moments. And always there is the possibility that the words of mine that the kids will ultimately remember will be ones spoken too quickly in anger or frustration; that a snide comment escaped from my lips and quickly forgotten by me will slide under their skin and stay there and fester.

I have to face up to the fact that there’s no guarantee that they will remember the placid and laid-back Ms. D of extended Read Alouds and joyous field trips… That Ms. D must contend with the bug-eyed, frantic, vein-popping, lobster-faced, sputtering, spitting werewolf-Medusa-monster that I hate to admit I sometimes become.

I have a grad school professor who has a remarkably deep respect for the power of words. He tells his students that he would never consider working with children for fear of the damage he could unwittingly inflict.

Although I’m careful and think before I speak, I speak an awful lot of words in a day, (and more than two dozen pairs of ears are meant to be listening to them at all times.) Despite my best efforts, I’m afraid ugly or wrong or misbegotten words are bound to slip out and make their way to my impressionable young charges’ ears, and possibly make a permanent impact on their psyches, becoming a dink in the perfect clay mold.

I suppose, since it’s too late to back out now, all I can do is hope the kids are smart enough not to listen to everything I say.