Ode to Twenty Years: One Teacher's Reflections on Two Decades in the Classroom
As I write this, it is one week since the close of my twentieth year as a teacher. I look at this milestone with astonishment, puzzling over where the years have gone. And I wonder how I could possibly write anything to encapsulate twenty years of lesson plans, chalk dust, math facts, storybooks, band aids, and an entire generation of energetic youngsters. It’s not that I consider myself a hero for sticking to this job for twenty years. As with any vocation, a great deal of it is simply putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes this has involved a level pathway flooded with sunshine, while at other times it has been a rugged mountain trail and a wild stumbling in the darkness.
Several hundred students have come through my classroom, and I think of the diverse roads they have taken. I know how it is to be reading the local news and to read of a former student who was arrested for crimes he committed. I have stood beside the coffin of a former student who died in an accident. I have also had the joy of having a number of former students return to become my fellow staff members at school, and most recently it has been an odd privilege to see former students return to my school as patrons. It won’t be long until I can teach some “grandstudents.” This, too, is incomprehensible to me.
As I look back over two decades in the classroom, I see the blood, sweat, and tears (all three of those, very literally, as well as other body fluids with which we teachers of young children become entirely too familiar). But I also see abundance of joy. I see the sacred beauty of childhood. I see children who have learned and improved under my direction. I see laughter, friendship, and the never-ending sparkle of exploration and discovery.
Though many things become predictable, this job of mine has the unceasing capacity to surprise and baffle me. Just when I think I have seen it all, I can be blindsided by the craziest circumstances. And I’m not just talking about things like CYS showing up at school, wanting to interview my student, or a student going missing during the school day, or the ex-con bio-dad of two foster kids in our school coming and demanding to see his sons, or the time the school day was delayed because of a power outage caused by a squirrel. I’m also talking about the breadth and depth of human character, and all that can be contained inside the brain of an eight-year-old child. It is truly astounding.
I have been called the “best teacher in the whole wide world.” I have been called the “meanest teacher in the whole wide world.” And practically any insult or compliment between those two sentiments. I have learned to take them all with a grain of salt. Sometimes the two extremes have been voiced by the very same student, possibly even on the same day.
I have made a thousand mistakes along the way, and sometimes I cringe when I think of the way I handled some things back in the early years when I was still practically a child myself. Yet over the years I see God’s grace outpoured—grace for mistakes, grace for the hard days, grace for that student who needed an extra chance. I wonder sometimes if I have learned more than I have taught. And I am still learning. The sense of strength and competence that comes with extensive experience can still mingle freely with self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy. So, I celebrate twenty years of the Lord’s grace; and whether I teach one more year or another twenty, I will always need that grace.
