Once I answered the call to teach, I have lived that passion every day in its various forms. The adage, “To teach a child is to touch the future,” has guided me and anchored me in my commitment to each individual student regardless of subject, curriculum, and exams. The absence of daily interaction with my students has also taught me an important lesson.
These students are my hope.
Knowing a child is knowing the future. Hearing their curiosity about the way things work is not something relegated to the lower grades revolving around how plants grow or planes fly. Curiosity lives among the older students as well. In my Government class, students ask why a member of Congress has so much power or how a particular President can get away with a certain behavior. They want to know where in the Constitution the rights of individuals and individual states are addressed. Just as the child holding the worm in the middle of a patch of strawberries might examine its life and purpose, my students wonder at the life and purpose of a nation and its constitution.
Living without seeing them, teaching via a PowerPoint or video and its dearth of interactions feels like a series of deaths to my great big hope. Compounded daily, the fulfillment of teaching loses its substance. What is learning without inquisitiveness? What is growth when you can’t see the kernel and the soil where the question began? Do questions even exist in the atmosphere of the internet, a global forum lacking organic matter, heart-filled wonder, brain-driven instruction, and peer-to-peer dialogue about a subject?
This morning, I rode with my son to music rehearsal for church tomorrow where he will be playing with a group of his peers. My heart burst at the thought of seeing students and I realized what was missing: hope.
These students are our hope for the future. When I hear the questions they ask in class, I want to shout from the rooftops: Listen to this, Great World! Listen to these thinkers! They ponder! They ask! They consider! They deliberate! They care…and they’re kind!
Every day when I hear them grapple with the answers, I see hope. Every day when I hear them exchange healthy dialogue about contentious ideas, I hear hope. And when I forget, their feedback reminds me: My favorite days are when we debate and discuss and disagree about difficult ideas. My students remind me: There is hope. They are hope. I have hope.
To the adage “To teach a child is to touch the future,” I would add: To teach a child is to know hope for the future.
To the Class of 2020, thank you for one more lesson, for teaching me and giving me reason to hope. Good luck. You are amazing. You’ve got this.
dana bundy 