Thank You, Whoever You Are

I remember very little about a certain elementary school program in which I participated. Probably once a week, a small group of sixth graders left the classroom and attended a sort of enrichment class taught in a school trailer. As to the teacher, I don't remember her name, and I don't remember what she looked like either. She might have had REALLY long brown hair, but I could be mixing her up with someone else. In fact, I think that there were two teachers.

These women were different from any adults that I knew at the time. Probably because they weren't like my parents, it seemed to me that they were very exotic. In my sixth-grade mind, I might have thought that they were hippies. All I know for certain is that this enrichment class was unlike any experience I had had in the classroom. For example, one presentation was about a certain South American country (I don't remember which one), and one or both of the teachers had travelled to this place and brought back 'strange' objects for us to see, hear and feel. There were also fascinating pictures, and strange stories about these people who lived so far away. For goodness sake, they fry BANANAS there (as our teachers demonstrated)! I'll never forget how amazed I was about frying bananas.

Although something was undoubtedly awakened inside of me that year, my full appreciation of the program wasn't realized until much later. In fact, the trailer class was all but forgotten until I was in college. One day, when I was visiting home, I was looking through old scrapbooks that my mom had made of childhood treasures, including significant school work. As I turned to a particular page, my eyes fell upon the evaluation card for my participation in the sixth grade enrichment program. Although the comments were mostly glowing (why else would my mom have kept it, right?), one part in particular caught my attention. It said something like, "Jennifer tends to make harsh judgments. Her responses are very black or white."

I was stunned. Maybe I had read the evaluation when I was in sixth grade, but I must not have understood what it meant. Like a patient friend, waiting until I was ready, the teacher who wrote it awoke and spoke to me again. As a young adult, I had already begun to seek understanding about myself (i.e. why I think the things that I think), but this assessment affected me profoundly. In the many years that have followed, it has become a frequent reminder of the importance of pushing beyond my initial impressions and judgments.

Like my enrichment teachers, I myself have lived abroad now; in fact, few things give me greater pleasure. I still believe in certain 'black or white' principles, but my delight in variety, as well as my respect for diversity, continue to grow. I am a better friend, a better teacher, and a better person for having been thoughtfully observed and evaluated as a sixth grader. Simply put, a greater degree of balance began to develop in my life the day that I discovered the words of a long-forgotten teacher.

So, 'thank you' to a mother who dared to include a less-than-perfect evaluation of her little girl in a scrapbook of treasures. And of course, 'thank you' to the teacher who took the time to care about her job, and who was willing to challenge me, to listen to me, and then to thoughtfully assess my abilities. I'm sure you have forgotten me, as I have forgotten you. Maybe you don't even teach any more. If not, did you know that your teaching lives on in me? Thank you, whoever you are.

Jennifer Heywood