Many Years Ago There Was Student One

So many years ago I can’t calculate without a calendar actually.

Give me a minute.

I had to go look up someone from the class I’m thinking of who is on my Facebook page. They just had a birthday and I knew they had those numbered balloons so I could work backward. So if they are now 27, they were in 8th grade 14 years ago.

In middle school years, that’s something like 2,000 years. No, seriously. Ask anyone about their 8th grade year and they will tell you it was yesterday and it was a million years ago. It is the weirdest and most out of place year. I have no idea why. There is probably some scientist in a little bunker somewhere figuring it out. All I know is…it’s a crazy year. Which is why I love teaching it. I am just a little bit crazy myself. I think you have to be to teach 13 year olds though. I really mean it. My first middle school principal informed me half the staff was on “happy pills” and I might want to look into it. She also loved what she did so it wasn’t a ‘Warning!’ per se, it was more like a lower case w ‘warning’. See? Sounds crazy. Unless you’re someone who works in a middle school, because right now you’re like, ‘oh, right, I totally get it’.

Anyway, it was a long long time ago. I lived just up the hill from my school and spent a lot of time getting to know the kids and families in my school. They would shout out to me on their way to the pool in the summer, then as they got older they’d make money by helping me with the yard or they’d come to help me shovel out after a bad snowstorm in the winter, it was absolutely the best situation possible because they knew me as a person and their families knew me as a neighbor and I knew them the same way. It made our relationship in school so much richer to have been at someone’s birthday or to have seen someone grocery shopping and stopped to chat for a few minutes about a recipe. We were real people to each other.

To be clear, I love my students. I think they are amazing and incredible and I can’t tell you how much I love the families I get to work with. It’s also the hardest job I’ve ever done. Which leads me to my first story. I’m not using names because I don’t have permission, so for the purposes of this first posting, he’s going to be named One.

One was exactly the kind of child who will make you love teaching middle school or leave it. He was a no holds barred, pain in the neck, always wisecracking, always ‘on’ kind of kid that can make you miserable if you aren’t just as fast and just as funny. One and I were kindred spirits. He helped me plan part of one of the best April’s Fools Jokes of all time actually. But he wasn’t someone who sometimes got in trouble. One was someone who got in TROUBLE. And not in a cute country song kind of way. One was living in a place and time when he had to make hard choices and they weren’t always good ones. Finally, his mother, at her wit’s end, sent him to live with his brother and sister-in-law in Florida to go to a military academy. We were all heartbroken. One was such an integral part of everyone’s life that we couldn’t imagine class without him.

One moved to Florida and we kept in touch through his mother and then, as he got older, directly with him. He was struggling to find his place and trying to figure out how to live with a much older brother and sister-in-law he barely knew. He had sent some mail to school detailing his struggles and I answered because I truly believe that once someone has been one of ‘my kids’ they are always one of ‘my kids’. You shouldn’t tell a child you’re there to support them, spend more time with them than their family does, and then walk away if they aren’t on your class roster anymore. To me, that’s just wrong. So I don’t do it. I think some of the younger teachers think I’m crazy, but the kids’ very few people can manage often walk into my room and just do what I ask them to. To me, that makes my choices seem pretty darn sane.

After a year and a half, I had decided to go back to school and I was struggling to get a paper done. It was a Sunday and it was due by midnight and I was tired and cranky and I wanted to quit. I don’t get that way often but it was an annoying paper and I didn’t see the value in it. That’s when One called. When I was in the middle of getting ready to quit. He was homesick and called to see how everyone was and to see if I could help him cheer himself up.

I had nothing.

Normally I can pull a good motivational speech out of thin air. I actually get motivated by giving them if that makes sense. So I tried. I really tried. I thought if I could get him motivated then maybe I could jump start myself too, but I was just so drained I couldn’t think of a thing. Instead, I told One what had been going on with my day. I was trying to gently excuse my inability to help him when all of a sudden it turned around in a complete 180 and he was giving *me* a motivational speech. Telling me I couldn’t quit because too many people relied on me to be the person who wouldn’t quit, that too many kids needed to see me overcome the same obstacles so they knew they could do it too.

He told me I could do it and I believed him. He told me my success mattered and I believed him. He told me if I could finish my paper and he could finish his homework then we could both prove nothing could stop us and I believed him.

I wrote that paper and aced the class. All thanks to One.

I tell this story and people say ‘Well, I mean it’s not *all* because of him’

Oh yes it was. He convinced me that my success mattered to him and because I didn’t want to disappoint him, or myself, I did the absolute best I could do.

What I learned from One that day is how important it is to have someone in your corner. How important it is to hear someone say you matter and your success matters and to be able to believe them. Every class and every year since I’ve made every effort to figure out who doesn’t have someone in their corner and to then be there for them. I learned it isn’t important who you are, if you believe in someone it shows, you can’t fake it, and even though the impact you can have on someone’s life when you say, “I believe in you” is almost impossible to measure, it’s absolutely worth doing.

Thank you One.