To Teachers everywhere and to Kelsey

            I retired from a 40 year teaching career four years ago . . . sort of.

            Even now, every August, I prepare mentally for the Back to School rush. I dream about painting my classroom walls purple, setting up my classroom, hanging posters, decorating bulletin boards, and begging the custodians not to replace my ancient blackboard with an ugly white dry erase board.

            In my dream, I challenge myself once again to learn all 150 students’ names in three weeks before their parents barge through the school doors at Open House. I write objectives, fill out lesson plans and temporary class rolls reminding myself that class changes will occur for three to four weeks, so writing names alphabetically in permanent ink in a roll book the first week will just tick me off. Neatness is next to godliness.

           I picture myself in day long meetings every single “teacher workday/preparation day” before that first day of school . . . cockamamie, top-down directives and the powers-to-be figuring out creative ways to read the 100 page faculty handbook to our bright-eyed, smiling faculty. I’d rather read the darn thing at home and during faculty meetings catch up on everyone’s summer adventures and plan Friday afternoon Happy Hour.

           Every August I reach for a 200 page ring binder that is filled with notes, letters, and cards from students, parents, and colleagues that I received over my long career. I kept that binder on my desk at school. When I was stressed out about school matters, I thumbed through the binder so I would be reminded that I was reaching students, and I was making a difference.
           

One of my 12^th grade students in 2008,

Kelsey, created an eighteen page scrapbook for me the year I retired.

She must have spent hours writing that parody of

“The Night Before Christmas”

 to describe my classes’ adventures through World Literature.

It is funny, moving, creative, intelligent, poignant, and clever.

I stored my teaching career in twenty boxes that live in my basement.








This gift I keep in my home office so I could relive her moving and adorable memories of that one semester she was in my class.
           

            I don’t think Kelsey realized how much that gesture meant to me, and I don’t know if
I conveyed to her how moved I was by her gift.

It was not a class assignment. She intended it to be a going away gift.

She had no idea how stressed and sad and relieved I was about retiring.

My dad was in the final stages of Alzheimer’s. He lived ten hours away, and it was difficult for me to visit as often as I would have liked. Career and family commitments got in the way. 

I took Kelsey’s scrapbook with me when I visited him in June, the month after I retired. 

I read it to him and told him how much I was going to miss teaching and how much I appreciated the opportunities

I had to help students excel. He smiled, but I don’t think he understood what I was saying. It still felt good to be able to talk to him about my life.

            Kelsey’s scrapbook symbolizes the most important outcome I tried to instill in my students:

the ability to think creatively and synthesize learning concepts.

She achieved that in a

spectacular way.

And, in the process, she gave me a gift that takes on multi levels of meaning and touches my heart every time I read it.

           

There is so much in my head that I could tell teachers from the experiences I had in the classroom. Educational philosophies aside, I would tell them to know their students. If they do, they will figure out that subject matter means nothing unless it is delivered to each student’s needs and expectations.

“The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think—rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.

         Clay P. Bedford

Have a good school year.