I almost did my student teaching in the district where I work now. I’d been assigned to a fourth grade classroom at one of many elementary schools in the district and had gotten far enough into the process to visit the school and meet my cooperating teacher. A couple of weeks before the assignment was set to begin the college called all of us newbies for a pre-student teaching meeting, during which I first learned we were forbidden from completing our student teaching in a district if we had any relatives employed there. As both my mother and my cousin were.
At first I thought, “It’s a huge district. Nobody’s going to care. They have close to thirty elementary schools. That rule has to be in place for small rural districts with one elementary school or something like that. Nobody’s going to make any connections between us.” But since I was the same compulsive little rule follower back then that I still am now, I brought it to the attention of some professor, who replied with a wide-eyed stare and what I can only assume was a significant blood pressure spike. Long story short -- a different student had just dropped from the program and the spot at Snail Lake I took opened up and the rest is history.
But after I was hired in the district myself, it didn’t take more than a few months for me to learn my assumptions had been misguided. For the next several years I wouldn’t walk into any kind of district meeting, staff development session, or major event without encountering someone who knew my mother.
My last name isn’t terribly common. It’d be a different story if you traveled to Ireland, but over here there just aren’t a lot of us running around. In fact I learned in the past year that since all the male cousins on my father’s side have only fathered daughters, the pressure is really on me to carry on the family name... well, history will have to decide how that eventually works out. But if there are only two people with the same name in a school district of over three thousand teachers, and one of those people is close to thirty years older than the other, people start connecting the dots.
A lot of people knew we were mother and son when I started subbing since 80% of the jobs I got were at her school, not so coincidentally. But even after I got my first classroom (her school secretary pulled her out of a workshop week meeting so I could give her the news), I started to see just how widely networked she was. It was always nice to hear about these connections because it gave me a familiar anchor in a district so large that it may or may not cover the same square mileage as Rhode Island. I did eventually reach something of a tipping point where it seemed like people were starting to know me as an individual, but often that only lasted until somehow the dots were connected again.
And I never minded this. My mother was the biggest influence I had in not just becoming a teacher but also in evolving into the teacher I am now, and I’ve never been anything but proud to claim that. I knew well how loving and kind and patient she was as a mother -- trust me, I put that last descriptor to the test more than once -- but only when we began to share colleagues did I come to fully appreciate how widely respected she was for those same qualities that made her the mother she’s always been. Whenever someone made the connection between us -- whether it was a student, or an instructional coach, or a union officer, or a teacher, or a paraprofessional, or a principal, or a parent, or an associate superintendent -- whatever memories about her came up as they spoke to me were reflected on their faces with genuine respect and affection. It always gave me a reminder of how broad of a legacy and a standard I had to strive for.
It’s taken the better part of twenty years to reach the point where there are more people who hear my name and identify me as someone other than Tina’s son, but it’s really only happening because the generation ahead of me that knew her so well has been going through successive rounds of retirements in recent years. But you know what? It still happens anyway. Just a couple of months ago I was walking in the hallway to pick up my mail after lunch when a woman I didn’t know stopped me. She was in the building that day to complete some testing with one of my students and wanted to confirm the scheduling that had been set up in advance was still going to work. After we quickly settled that it would, she brought up that she’d known a woman at a different school with my name and wondered if we were related. I told her we were. And as she began telling me her Tina story, she smiled.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! Thanks for setting the bar so high. I love you!
