A memoir--my first love--a tribute to teaching and to all of my students!

All of my remembered life, I had wanted to be a teacher. Early on, when other children may have played mommy or daddy or doctor or soldier, I would play teacher, setting my dolls and teddy bears up to teach them. They were such good, well-behaved students!

In school where I felt safe and appreciated, I loved learning. I loved words. In choosing to major in English in college, perhaps I was searching for my own voice. At any rate, I tried an early marriage, finished college, and found myself on my own again, living in Ashland City and teaching English at Cheatham County Central High School (CCCHS) in 1972 at the age of 23.

At that time up until about 1985 when I transferred to Harpeth High School, CCCHS was the only high school in Cheatham County, so we teachers got to experience students from all over the county, and the students from the small towns all over the county got to meet each other, perhaps for the first time. We would graduate about 250 seniors a year, so the school was big enough to offer some electives without being too big--it was the perfect size really.

Teaching wasn’t exactly love at first sight. That first year of teaching was frightening and frustrating. There were a lot of tears in the afternoons and evenings. And, thank God, there was a lot of support from other teachers.

My first principal Mr. Todd had hired me in the morning, and by that afternoon, he had put me directly into the classroom. With no in-service or time to prepare a lesson, I had to wing it.

The classroom I was put into was called an “open classroom,” primarily because it had no walls. It was an open area made up of three classrooms in a “pod,” or a semi-circle. There were over a hundred high school freshmen to whom another teacher--one of my “team” members--was giving information and directions.

As the students ignored the teacher who was talking, I walked around trying to get the kids to listen, yet they ignored me too and continued to converse and joke among themselves. And there was such a sea of faces that the two other team teachers and I were definitely outnumbered!

Feeling sorry for the teacher who was trying to speak over the top of their conversations, and at my wits end, I walked up to the front of the pod and asked the other teacher Ms. Rye if I could speak from behind the podium. Even though my voice shook, I proceeded to lecture to the large group of students on respect and self-discipline, on how they were being disrespectful to the teacher by not listening to her. To my surprise, they actually got quiet.

That may have been when I began to establish my reputation as a “take no hostages” type of teacher. I believed in education and in discipline and believed that the two should go hand and hand--that one could not happen without the other. My motto was discipline first (classroom management); then learning could take place.

In the next few years, the pod system and so-called team teaching broke down, and at last, I got my own classroom with four walls. Now I felt that I could really get down to the business of learning and teaching about language and literature and life.

How I loved to learn and to teach! I felt myself come fully alive--perhaps for the first time--in my classroom where I felt free to be my best, my true self. I had a confidence there that I had nowhere else. Being a morning person, I would get up at 4:30 a.m. to grade my students’ essays and watch the sun rise on a new day. I usually graded essays until 6:30 a.m., then got my family ready for school and work, and I would be in my classroom by 7:30, eager for the day, for my students to enter.

My classroom was my home away from home--perhaps my true home. I trusted my students--maybe even when I shouldn’t have. I shared my life with them and functioned best under the illusion (delusion?) that they were for me a friend. The grammar that I taught was an old friend, the literature was like a new friend, and the composition was a fickle friend, for I never quite knew how best to teach writing.

Writing was a tough concept to teach. With my somewhat mathematically mind-set, once I thoroughly understood a concept, I liked to simplify things for me and my students, for I always wanted them to know why we did what we did in language, why we chose one verb over another, or why we put a comma there, or else they would just be guessing about the correct answer. Teaching writing didn't quite follow such rules!

Teaching saved my life really, and it took my life away, but I loved it. No matter what was happening or not happening in my home life, the classroom allowed me to forget, and for eight hours each day, it allowed me to be live fully in the mindful moment. I simply loved being with my students--even the “stinkers”--they too kept me on my toes!

I had high expectations for myself as I did for my students. I believed that we teachers should live by a higher standard than others in society--that we should be models--paragons of virtue, if you please--for our students. I believed in the importance of education. I believed, for instance, that public education was the backbone of our American democratic society. It was what gave the students an equal chance to be successful. Education was a way of improving one’s self and one’s life. I believed in my students.

For me, it was the sweetest of times. Often in the evenings as I would read to and cuddle with my young daughter Ellen, I would nod off to sleep right there in her bed. My husband John would wake me as he went to bed later that night. Then I would snug with him before falling asleep again. It was a busy life--the life of a teacher, a wife, and a mother--but I embraced it whole-heartedly, and the years melted away like a candle burning down to its essence.

Albeit in the same county, in the mid 1980s, I transferred to a new school, Harpeth High School (HHS) in Kingston Springs, and there, I had to re-earn my reputation as a tough disciplinarian with high academic standards. In the new school, I became the English Department Chair for grades 7 through 12. With my belief that the English Department was the foundation of a school and set the standards for the other departments, I tried to help make it a strong department.

In the 1990s, I saw that America was changing rather rapidly as to the make-up of its society, and I believed that “the highest result of education is tolerance.” I believed that true tolerance was achieved through understanding. Thus I instituted into the HHS English Department a world literature course for the seniors, whereby they would study about the major world cultures and major religions through literature. At HHS in their sophomore year, the students would study American literature, in their junior year British literature, and then world literature their senior year--in an ever-widening view of the world. I considered that change to the English curriculum to be one of my most important contributions, and after I retired, I was saddened to see it regress to the way it had been--with no study about world cultures and major religions through literature in the senior year.

When burn out threatened or things got rough for me or outside forces intervened, I clung to what I believed and closed my door and taught my students. I probably would be clinging still if I had not been pushed out of teaching in 2010 by a new school director, who let go of all county-wide part-time or job-share employees.

Yet, retirement has been good to me. I love that my time is my own--to write my life stories, to sleep in until daybreak, to read as much as I want, to watch old movies, to love my granddaughters, to do morning yoga, to move more slowly, to create--to paint or to quilt, etc. But make no mistake, the teaching life was better.

Here is a poem I came across recently that I wrote in the early 1980s--after I had been teaching for about 10 years.

Each early morning hour as I enter my classroom,
I see the sun light filtering through the windows,
Causing the varnished desks to shimmer and shadow.

I thrill again at the sight of those old wooden desks,
Which symbolize so much tradition
And which represent the students who daily embody them.
The posters, which cover the pale green block walls,
Are reminders too of the classroom atmosphere and its content.

As I go about my morning chores--
Lovingly replacing a book to its rightful space on the shelf,
Picking up a scrap of paper with someone's handwriting on it here,
Recovering someone’s jacket from there,
An emotion of overwhelming tenderness wells up inside me.

I love you old classroom with your inoffensive, poster-covered walls
And your well-worn, nondescript soft carpet.
With those beautiful old wooden desks,
And that upright podium, standing out there front and center,
Like a well-worn sentinel of memories past and those yet to be made.

As my feet quietly tread the familiar yet unmarked path to the podium,
The bell sounds, the voices and noises of youth are heard,
And once again the day erupts in reverent apprehension of the life to come.