They’re coming back to you soon!
By Sally Friedman, Special Writer
They’re coming back to you soon. Presumably, they’re ready.
While I have no kids to send to you these days, one never forgets. Not their shiny, scrubbed, summer-drenched look. Not those feet that have run bare for nearly three months, now shod in brand new shoes – or more likely, sneakers du jour.
For some, the braces are on. For others, they’re off.
A few will have grown so tall, or will have lost the roundness that they had only three months ago, that you will gasp at the changes. Children never stand still – in both real and metaphoric ways.
So ready or not, here they come.
But some are probably worried about you – whether you’ll be kind, whether you’ll like them, whether you’ll forgive them for forgetting some of their long division over the summer.
Different things likely worry others who will be filling your classrooms today. There is always that little stab of anxiety on September days when the calendar says it’s time, but the stomachache says, “Now what?”
I remember when my own girls would try for nonchalance about those September grand openings. But it didn’t fool me. The trepidation showed on their faces and in their tempests about nothing – and everything – on those early September days.
When the two older girls were fussing over hair and clothes and high school schedules, their little sister was terrified about handling her first locker.
But lots of the worry still comes back to you. They wait to see what you’ll look like and sound like and act like. They wonder how you’ll treat them, even on these early fall mornings when everyone is trying extra hard.
Next week they’ll spill into your classrooms and fill them, maybe to overflowing.
You may feel angry and frustrated that there are too many of them, or overwhelmed by the mandate that we hand you: to reach and touch the most sullen, belligerent ones, along with the sweetly appealing ones. But come what may, these young people will be yours for the minutes and hours and months that stretch ahead. You, now, are their universe.
I once was a teacher myself. The career lasted all of one year because I was absolutely overwhelmed by teaching eighth graders the fine points of grammar and nuances of poetry when I was just 21 years old, and actually terrified of these kids. No school of education course had prepared me for the realities of a middle school classroom.
I left that June and never returned, retreating into pregnancies and motherhood. And oh, what lessons from that.
So I understand that we ask the world of you. Nobody knows that better than a former teacher.
We ask you to be good to them. Such a simple, profound request.
We ask you to treat them with dignity. To show them compassion.
They will have days when they feel stupid or ugly or misunderstood, and when just a word of encouragement from you could set their hearts soaring.
Know that the brightest of them will have dull days, and that the “dullest” ones may suddenly astonish and inspire you.
All that – and still, you must teach them the planets, the sonnets, why grass grows and rain falls, how a man named Hitler changed the face of the 20th century, and one named Osama Bin Laden forever altered the 21st.
So much to ask.
We want you not just to remember each child’s name and face and fears. To cram their heads with knowledge, yet teach them humility. We want you to be patient with them, even when your own life may be a mess.
In turning our children over to you, we parents give you all we have. Our most precious cargo.
So please handle them with care.