Tribute

<p style=”clear: both”>This is unimaginable to me, that as I write my mother is locking up her classroom and leaving for the last time. On the phone last night she said that she had been busy taking loads of all of the things she’s acquired over the years for teaching home so that this afternoon after the last bell rings she can walk away. Also unimaginable.

My father called earlier this week to make sure I was aware, in my physical distance from their lives, that today was her last day, and — our lives spinning fast here, tonight’s recital the 8th performance with at least one of my children in four weeks — the reminder was not ill-conceived. But he asked if I knew what it meant. And I suggested that every book that goes in a box to come home, ever mathematics manipulatives block that gets thrown onto the pile bears the imprints of each student in more than twenty years worth of classes. That there are ghosts.

I think the thing about growing up as the child of teachers is sometimes you get jealous of these, your parents’ other children, the ones to whom they also give themselves. Last summer I was talking casually to someone at the food carts to someone who turned out to be from Albuquerque too, and oh, where did you go to school? My dad was a teacher there… “Mr. Collins! Really you’re his daughter!” and it was strange. He had memories of my dad that would be different from my own, my dad’s performing teacher persona, that was so fiercely caring and idealistic and my parents are still the people I am trying to grow up to be like. But I think about the side of teachers that doesn’t get seen, the utter collapse on Friday afternoons from exhaustion, the sacrifice of personal lives to grading papers, the classroom filled with books, some of which were my sister’s and mine when we were little.

Another recollection is my dad encouraging me on a visit back to New Mexico to stop in and say hello to one of my former teachers — after I graduated he taught at the high school I had attended, and so the place was weirdly past and present, my own and his but not overlappingly so. And I don’t know if he understood how a former teacher was someone I couldn’t interact with casually, or maybe it was just me not knowing how to have a different relationship as a former student than that other more intense and hallowed one. I’d be thrown into a stuttering uncomfortable place, unable to make eye contact when I’d never had a moment’s shyness in the classroom before. And yet, in my head this seems right, that the sacred and intense relationship that exists between student and teacher is sacred and intense because it is temporary, because it is transient. My teachers all remain as ghosts in my head, just as I know all of my parents’ students remain ghosts in their heads. That there are pieces of all of our hearts given out and carried around whether we are aware of it or not.

Maybe that’s just the essence of civilization, the ghosts of teachers and students carried forward. An email yesterday from Portland Public Schools yesterday afternoon announced that they are slashing the school budget $19 million, and unthinking in my dismay I exclaimed in front of my alarmed seven year old, “That’s it! We’re living in the end times!” because what future can one imagine when the work of teachers isn ‘t valued? And when I asked my parents and friends of theirs, all former teachers, what the hardest part of the job was, my dad’s answer wasn’t inept administration or a lack of resources, the fact that they are expected to perform miracles and blamed for everything that they cannot fix, it was the daily encounters with hopelessness.This is how I know that my parents gave away small pieces of their hearts caring for every single kid they came in contact with, even the ones they couldn’t do anything for.

It all sounds sort of schlocky, in a big Mr. Holland’s Opus sort of way trying to write about, to think about their impact on all of these other lives, my parents, and I don’t think that skepticism of that story is an expression of pure cynicism. My parents will tell you that teaching is a good second career, that the idealism required to be a good teacher must be tempered by boundaries, to close the gradebook, make sure the fish is fed, straighten the desk chair stacked on top of the desk to make it easy for the custodians to vacuum, and turn out the lights with one lingering glance, and head home to collapse, talk about something that isn’t school. I worry that if I describe my mother, or my father, as heroic, it’s too pat, too easy. That to idealize can be a cheap recognition of the work, the heartbreak, the exhaustion, the limits of what they can do. But the thing they have done, it is not something small.

In some ways this is a reiteration of the cyclical post I write, about the May maudlins. Which is only right. One of the confusing things about a teacher’s life is they way they get to be in a student’s life, traveling this distance from September to May each year with a new group of students, seeing them grow and change and then taking two months to put themselves together, and starting again. Of course, they never retire as my parents and remain part of my life’s journey, as well as my kids’, but what I am left with this afternoon, wanting to pay tribute to my mother and all of the lives she’s been a part of, is how lucky I am to have gotten to witness this repeating heroism, and having no idea how she’s been able to do it.