A Short Story About Coloring and My Childhood Smart Mouth

My job as an elementary teacher means I probably spend more time coloring than most other adults. I have to make a lot of examples of projects to model student work, I make a lot of posters to post behavioral prompts and background information, and so on. I have an entire desk drawer devoted to markers and pens and dry erase markers and pencils and coloring tools of all variety. It's really somewhat out of control.

I don't mind coloring at all. It's often very calming, and gives me a nice break from having to think about nine different life-or-death school issues at the same time like I usually do. Some projects take longer than others, and when I find myself caught up in one of the longer ones, my mind almost always wanders back to a particular memory:

My history as a rule-following school toady goes all the way back to kindergarten. I loved school, I loved my teacher, I wanted to do well and worked very hard every day I was there, which was every day except the one sick day when I had to stay home. I remember there was only one sick day because it broke my heart that I couldn't be at school and was so excited the following day when I was allowed to go back.

Two years later it wasn't the same story. School was something to survive more than anything else because I had the worst teacher of my entire life. Seriously. She was the embodiment of every bad teacher caricature that has ever been illustrated in any comic strip or middle grade graphic novel. One day we were doing a second grade project that involved drawing and coloring flags from countries all around the world -- I think it had something to do with a school wide play or festival or musical blow-out or something. I was given Switzerland. I though this was great. All I had to do was draw a big plus sign in the middle, leave it alone, and fill the rest of my paper by scribbling my red crayon into oblivion. I didn't have any real attention span to speak of as a child (which is so different now, of course), so I literally scribbled. Everywhere. In all directions. It looked less like a flag and more like a piece of paper that had recently held four pounds of spilled spaghetti.

The teacher was stalking the aisles to evaluate our works in progress with her best impersonation of the animated schoolmaster from Pink Floyd's "The Wall," and when she reached my desk she stopped, stared, clucked accusingly, and sighed angrily.

"Didn't you learn how to color in the same direction like everyone else did in kindergarten??" she barked.

I looked at my paper, which I thought looked fine, and noticed that, yes, my red streaks were all over the place. Not knowing what else to say (and, frankly, a little tired of her at that point in the school year) I looked up and innocently said:

"I guess everyone else learned how to do that on the day I was sick."

And then the look on her face. If she could have legally gotten away with smacking me upside the head....

Back to School: Building a Legacy

When the 2015-16 school year comes to an end, I will have been teaching at the same school for 24 years. For perspective, this means that out of the approximately 80 people I currently work with, only three of them have been at that school longer than I have. Additionally, this 24th year is also something of a personal landmark for me, since I’ll be turning 48 years old within weeks of the school year ending.

It doesn’t take a math teacher to see this means I’ve now been at the same school for half of my life.

So far this 24th year has started like so many of the others have. The first week back was all about scrambling to get ready, attending various meetings and staff development sessions, and reconnecting with the colleagues we haven’t seen in months while starting to get to know the new people. One of our new teachers this year is someone who had been at our school years ago and was returning for a new position. I had some time to briefly catch up with her one morning. While we were talking, she mentioned how whenever she thought of me or heard my name, she immediately thought of the bunny suit I’ve worn at Halloween for the past ten or fifteen years.

This wasn’t a big surprise, since that costume has always stirred up quite a reaction. Since I started wearing it, there have been more yearbooks with pictures of me in that bunny suit than not. But her comment got me thinking later in the day: When my time there finally ends, will that costume be how I’m remembered?

I’ve taught 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades there, and have been the cooperating teacher to at least five student teachers. I’ve been invited to see students play any number of sports, attend their dance recitals and band concerts, and see their plays, sometimes years after they were in my class. I’ve been the school patrol advisor, the broadcast team advisor, the web site manager, the technology lead, and a union representative. I’ve served on the child study team, the crisis team, the building leadership team, along with so many other committees I can’t even remember what several of them were even called anymore.

But what are the things that would really stick with the thousand-plus students I’ve worked with by now? Would I really be remembered for a Halloween costume? Or just for fun times and jokes, or the books I used for read aloud? Or the times when I lost my temper, or found some powerful and unique way to completely screw up someone's day? Sure, there are always going to be a handful of students and parents who remember some positive difference you hopefully made, but there are probably just as many who retrospectively see you in an opposite light. And of course, there’s a huge group between those extremes who would need to stop and think to even remember anything about you only ten years after you were an integral part of their daily life. 

And then there’s the staff. Teachers share great camaraderie and commonly develop close personal bonds, but there are always conflicting ideas and personalities whenever people are tossed together into any kind of environment that relies on any degree of cooperation to succeed. I’ve been there long enough to see several close friends come and go over the years, along with people I never really got to know. For my part, I feel like I’ve had good personal and working relationships with the large majority of my colleagues, both current and past. Having said that, though, I’m neither naive nor arrogant enough to think I’m one of those rare exceptional people universally loved and respected by everyone I work with.

So where does all of this leave me after half a lifetime, or any of us, regardless of where we are in our lives? Is a legacy defined by the difference we make in the world around us, both in the people we help and the ones we hurt, whether we intended to or not? Is it something so intangible as to evade even a superficial concrete definition? Is a legacy really anything more than a one-dimensional punchline of remembrance, or a way to conveniently label a collective memory?

I think everyone does have a legacy, but none of us really get to directly determine what ours will be. Perhaps instead of wondering about what legacy we might leave behind, it’s more important to live presently, and be aware of what words and actions we insert into the lives of the people around us — and, particularly for teachers, the lives of our students. 

In just a couple more days I’ll have my 24th First Day of School, and the kids will be showing up with different levels of enthusiasm and readiness to be guided through another year. In the end, what they learn and if they feel cared for will be far more important than who did the teaching. But that ‘who’ part is going to matter as well. Even if we teachers don’t always get to see it, we need to remember how far our reach extends.

Our legacy isn’t really what we leave. It’s more about what our students take with them.