Students Are The Best Teachers

No teacher has ever taught me as much as the 22 children who created my 5th grade classroom this year. The lessons I learned from them cannot be found in any textbook, they were only uncovered through the relationships, with children and with a community. They are the class act.
It feels like just yesterday that I was reflecting on my experience as a first year teacher in Anacostia, the inner city community of our nation's capital. I had liked teaching and I even had a pretty successful first year defined by helping children with big academic deficiencies make significant gains towards grade level proficiency, but I didn't love teaching, yet, I liked it.

The summer came and went quickly and there I suddenly was again, sitting in a classroom full of boxes and dust in late August. I couldn't identify what was motivating me to spend hours planning and organizing and setting up my classroom. I was excited again and I had a newfound energy for creating a place for children to learn. Something deep down was driving me because I returned with greater urgency and with an open mind that enabled me to embrace this profession. That urgency I now attribute to the fact that I, like many Teach For America corps members, were attracted to the program because of the defining vision that "one day all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education." Somewhere around September 5th or 6th of my first year, that vision really crept away from my priorities list. All children was much too large of a feat; I was trying to figure out how to educate the 22 children who sat in my classroom everyday while distributing little red raffle tickets to any student who breathed quietly. I rarely thought about Teach For America's vision during my first year.

But then around the end of September of my second year, my classroom started to emerge as this amazingly successful place, I started to feel like I was part of something greater; I recognized that teaching was something was more than making it through each day. I have to give my class and their parents credit this evolution, for we certainly traveled it together. After days and weeks, and in some cases months of indoor recesses, missed specials, phone calls, do-overs, and yes very persistent nagging demands, my students realized the benefits of using their tremendous amounts of energy and personality to improve their academic performance. I was always respected by my students and their parents, but I was not always liked. In fact my incessant demands and lack of leniency aroused one parent to nickname me "the baddest witch around that school MLK." She later told me this as we sat drinking Mountain Dew on the couch in her living room. These struggles defined the beginning of my second year as a teacher, the year I fell I love with teaching, the same years that Rasha's mom called me a witch in September and then called me again on Mother's Day to say that I deserved this day as much as anybody.

If you asked me today, I would tell you that I teach amazingly intelligent, motivated, loving children this year whose greatest daily desire is to please me. I would add that I am tremendously supported by parents who are devoted to helping their kids make the best possible choices and to succeeding today in school and tomorrow in life. And it wouldn't be a lie. I don't know that every year will be as wonderful as this has been for me, I know that not everyone sitting out there has been able to experience the joys of teaching as I have. I have been enormously lucky this year, and I know it. I saw the theory of high expectations at its best, but even more than that, I was witness to the humanness of teaching, to the relationships with children and with a community that last so much longer than the benefits of even the best math lesson. Just last week, when PE was cancelled, I took my 5th grade class outside. The children were convinced that they could teach me to double Dutch. Of course I was terrible and I didn't learn to double Dutch, but I was so touched by their patience with me and their support of my efforts. They were so much more patient and kind with my efforts to learn than I ever am with them when I am teaching lessons. That afternoon we spent with double Dutch, basketballs and 10-cent ice pops from the corner store will remain more vivid and important to all of us, than all the little academic skills we acquired every other afternoon of the school year.

Teaching is human, and while many people will never lesson plan, never sit on the couch late night cutting construction paper out, and never have that wonderful chalk line running across the backside of your black pants, they can still be teachers and they can work to give children a better chance with small but meaningful human interactions. And that I know from a lesson my students taught me with a telephone cord jumping rope and some catchy double Dutch lyrics.

-- Kelly Murphy, American University