An Affair of the Heart: Reflections on my first month teaching

Stats

Weeks of summer school: 4

Kids in my class: 11

White kids in my class: 0

Teachers in my class: 3

Average age of my kids: 7

Superman Band-Aids used: 6

Nights spent drinking wine: most of them

Through the stress, chaos and persistent feelings of inadequacy that accompanied my first month teaching, my  emotional rocks have been my fellow TFA corps members. We stagger off the buses  nursing battle injuries and headaches, dragging ourselves to our afternoon sessions with the weary convictions that YES, this work is important, and DAMN is it difficult. I never thought that teaching 11 seven-year olds how to add and subtract would require so much brainpower. (I'm admittedly overwhelmed to think what it's going to be like when there are 23 of them and only one teacher.)

We commiserate in the dining hall, swapping horror stories and funny moments in a daily council of catharsis. One teacher had a girl puke all over the math materials on her desk in the first week. Another high school teacher was talking about pets with his students and made the comment “I have a snake,” which was met with uproarious laughter.

The same teacher shares later in the summer that one of his students had just found out that he was going to be a father. I suddenly feel lucky to be dealing with temper tantrums and runny noses. Another corps member mentions that she thinks one of her students has Chlamydia because he gets up to pee every 45 minutes. Someone else points out that it could also be diabetes, but she says she thinks it’s Chlamydia because the Chlamydia rate for 18-24 year olds in the region is somewhere around 80%. Most kids don’t show symptoms.

Somehow the stories of teenage pregnancy and chlamydia turned into jokes, and as we laugh I feel my stomach twist. Why am I laughing? Why are WE laughing? I ask the question out loud, and a friend speaks the cutting truth.  

“We laugh so that we don’t cry.”

We laugh so that we don’t cry. Humor is the body’s best defense against heartbreak.

My heart breaks daily for my kids. It breaks when I realize that one of my girls can’t add single digit numbers on her fingers, when she should be starting to grasp more complex word problems and subtraction. It breaks when they talk about the guns that their parents (or aunts, or grandparents) keep in the cupboard. It breaks when they admit to being sleepy in class because they slept on a couch last night, and put their heads down angrily when their classmates press for details. I’ve learned that there are some questions you don’t ask.

But for every moment of heartbreak there is heart-growth in greater volume. Every morning they skip gleefully through the door with wide eyes and toothy grins, blissfully unaware that two more unarmed Black men were shot that week, unaware of the burdens that lie at the end of childhood.

For today, we’ll do the Nae Nae. The world can wait.

My heart expands in the first week when my boys are telling me about their pets, and one boy says he has two dogs. The next boy claims to have five dogs, and the third purports to have NINE.

 “Oh really?” I ask, “and what are their names?”

 “Jake,” he says. “They’re all named Jake.” 

My heart expands when they beg me to let them do a cinnamon roll hug at the end of every day, and without fail, fall over laughing.

My heart expands when decide they would rather build toothpick and marshmallow villages (complete with birthday cakes and a library) than marshmallow towers during our final team building activity.

My heart expands in the second week when one of my girls wraps herself tightly around my knees at the end of the day and says “Ms. Kiel, you’re not from Africa, but I still love you.” They run their fingers through my silky hair and stare at my blue eyes with wonder, and it occurs to me that some of them have never had a white teacher before. They laugh at me for not knowing who Kevin Gates is. (He’s a rapper.)

My heart expands when on the last day, the girl who couldn’t add at the beginning of the summer scores proficient on her computer test in math, and nearly cries with pride when I give her a shoutout in front of the class.

On the last day my supervisor presents me with a picture of the same girl holding a sign that says “I am why you Teach for America.”

I cry.

My heart breaks when I leave them.

*****

My first month as a teacher has been mentally, physically and emotionally exhausting, which is to say, it has been everything I expected and more. There have been days that went amazingly well (mostly by lucky guessing than intentional design) and there were days when the lesson plan fell apart and the room descended into chaos, and all I could think about were the dozen things I needed to change for tomorrow. Through the chaos, a calm and steady voice in my head issued a command: love. Just love.

My favorite definition of love is that it is primarily a verb. To love.

I am not going to be a perfect, or even necessarily good teacher for a while. It takes practice, patience, reflection, and an extraordinary level of grace for one's self. If I can do nothing else every day, I can love them. As a wise physician once said, the best medicine for humans is love. And if it doesn’t work? Increase the dose.