The Halcyon Days of Hormones

"Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater." ~Gail Godwin

Listen to me, children. If a teacher ever tells you that they don't have favorites, they are lying. We may not "pick" favorites, but there are some kids that will just weasel their way into our hearts, and you might be surprised to learn that it isn't just the smart, polite, helpful kids (thought this is a good start) but some of the troubled, smart-ass, belligerent ones too. But we have favorites, whether we want to or not.

I suppose that it is human nature to want whatever it is that we don't have. My last year teaching, I wanted so bad to be back in school, to continue this journey, to postpone my adulthood, to bury myself in my own bizarre interests. There I was finally getting better at teaching, and I was yearning for the outside, to shrug off that responsibility. And now I'm here, indulging in this wild world of academia, and I miss my kids. I won't go so far as to say that I miss the Rickys, Johns, and Dillons (if any of my teacher friends are reading this, you know exactly why), but the inclination is there. Even the Rickys, Johns, and Dillons, crazy as they made me, won me over on some strange level. They may have made me pull my hair out and drive home crying my eyes out, but I loved them. I wanted better of them, and better for them.

And then on the opposite end, we have my sweet (if hyper) Drama kids who made my life a little bit easier every day with their eagerness and silliness and angst. What a strange little lovely dance we all had. And we have all those in between. The quiet ones, the distracted ones, the stubborn ones, the indifferent ones, the giggly ones, the smelly ones, the loud ones, the timid ones, the mean ones, the gentle ones.

But I had favorites, no doubt about it.

There was Esaw (not his real name, but it was a similar unintentional misspelling of a biblical names) who couldn't read or write a coherent sentence if his life depended on it. He was a volunteer fire fighter and was sweet as he could be as long as you didn't ask him to read anything outloud. He would have chewed off his right arm if I had asked him too, but I knew better than to ask him to read anything. One day he brought a wounded bird to school with him, trying to nurse it back to health. This is a kid who had shot and ate just about every critter in Oconee County, but he was just fretting over this little bird. He left it in my classroom while he went to lunch, and told me emphatically,"If anybody touches that bird, you just tell me and a will whoop 'em good." The bird died during third period, and he came up to me as I was reading out loud from The Bean Trees, interrupted me and said: "Ma'am, my bird done died. Can I go outside and bury it." And God bless him, he did.

There are so many others. I miss the adventure of teaching. I miss the small, rare successes. I miss the exasperation. I miss looking into the turbulent faces of adolescence. Weird, huh?