A school has many hallways and each one has a different story crying out to be heard. The halls carry the average childhood conversations and much more. The sounds of the day are not for the faint of heart as they can eat you up, but if you are in tune with the haunting melodies the bonds and respect are endless.

The everyday pain kids feel in todays world is met with my smile and open heart. So many of my students fall through odd holes that whisk them through terrors that they discuss with a certain adult quality. Just this week a mom came out of jail, two kiddos were in crisis, and another stepped forward to save a friend, while another is struggling with teacher issues that impact his little world. This was Monday. Then there are the tears that just flow for countless reasons but the rawness is too new to share. Year after year, (number nineteen is almost in the books) I put kids not tests first. Looking at the week, watching their faces, rescheduling my educational requirements, teaching and re-teaching, and getting things done in a way that does not follow the standard and perhaps break a rule or two.

Most days it is not the lesson that is first and foremost in my mind. It is the smile I give and long to receive. Students tend to know me as one who will listen and find a solution on the campus to their issue. However, always the first to say the obvious. “I do not have the answers, but I will fight to find the help you need.” This along with a bit of humor and a few glass half-full thoughts to get them through the day, or worse the weekend without the constant of school schedule and the support not seen at home. This is when I pray.

This time of year I have a stream of students following me just for my smile and the one I find within them, that I can force out, so they can feel a bit lighter for the day. I often have thought that the perfect Pied Piper costume should be my standard uniform. My door is always open and lunch in my room is a revolving door so students can have a safe place just to be without other 8th grade lunchroom gossip. None of this is to brag about me, I am not special, just tuned to a different drummer.

While my methods are the antithesis of the testing generation, (I have 4 weeks of testing just around the corner) I stick to my heart as I know within my classes my students are working harder within the curriculum confines and I am producing writers. We just get down to business, write, share, write, share, edit, share, write, and turn-in. I follow the curriculum but march to my own beat. Seeing beyond the lessons to create the dynamic that touch my population and make them want to write and rarely ever using the same lessons twice, as each group is different. I break boundaries and create trust through writing. Reading about my students/parents time in jail, their parents rejection, having to work to put food on the family table are much better launch prompts than the pretend prompts that will come soon enough to prepare for the test which I always look at as their scores, not mine, not the schools.

I wish more would let go and teach as the conversation surrounding the test is wearing on our kids and forgetting our overall goal of teaching to the child. This season of testing smile more, be positive, let go of this is your score, and love your kids, and please remember if we are stressed they are overwhelmed. Insert some fun where you can even if it is fifteen minutes of recess for no other reason than play.

Add this post under the stuff entitled memories that travel.

My most treasured item from my classroom is a refrigerator, and not an ordinary one. A small tiny silver and black cube that has been lifted all over this valley. Through the years it has lost its initial luster and now is a roving display of stickers from a variety of students that wanted to leave their mark. Skateboard stickers, bike brand stickers, happy face stickers etc. Kids that love the fact that I love them, even to the point of keeping all stickers in tact. It looks less and less like a refrigerator and more and more like a scrapbook, but it is one that I cannot shun to the side, in favor of a newer model. So while it over freezes and sometimes the rubber comes a little loose, I always have a student to the rescue fixing my woes, as no one wants the refrigerator to lose its rightful place…as one student put it…”it would not be your room without that thing.” So true, sort of like my ruby red slippers and giant Wizard of Oz painting.

My room has ruby red slippers, costumes and paintings from students. It is a room filled with love. It is home. It is where my students can be my students, at least for a year, and then visit and reminisce and ask me to re-tell the stories (all true) of how each piece of my room became part of my culture.

The refrigerator still travels on well past its prime and the day it stops, as it will someday, I have vowed to use it as a shrine to my teaching career placed carefully on my Turkish rug with my photo, yes photo. Not requested, trust me! It was a gift for all to see and question. For fun, after my return from Turkey, I placed it at my classroom doorway to watch the expression on people’s faces as they enter. Priceless. The rest of my decor comes with the territory. The ever-changing laughter, love, and constant chaos that comes with the profession. My little traveling refrigerator is my constant that is a reminder of my past, present and future.

Today, the refrigerator lives in my office due to my break from education and the end of an era of being allowed to have small electrical appliances in our rooms. It still works. I might bring it in unplugged of course.

And so it begins a regular seventh hour when a student bellows throughout the room the status of my eyelashes. Yes, they have status. Not mine, but teen eyelashes do, and mine were not on point. Now, by seventh hour my lashes could be doing a tango for all I care, as this hour keeps me on my toes, but no, I was not to have clumpy lashes on that day in that very moment. “Sit down Mrs. L, this is going to take work, what are you doing in the morning?” “Um, well you know the usual,” I say with a glimmer of please, oh please let this moment pass. The others in class were busy with their writing coursework and this little doll was doing what she did best, ignoring work when she was stressed. I have known her for years, and I knew our beauty session was not about my lashes, it was her life that she needed a short escape from and my eyelash rearrangement gave her what she sought. We talked and laughed about my lack of skill and her obvious skill and evaded the true topic that I knew she wanted to blurt out, but today was not to be that day. My clumps would have to do. As she went to work with precision, she poked and prodded at the task at hand, shrinking from issues and creating her little masterpiece. She stared at me like so many times before and gave me a wink of thanks. “You are the best, you know it right?” She stepped back and gave me the nod (only known to us) and went back to work. It was her kind words between my treatment that I finally heard clearly for the first time.

When I began 25 years ago, I wanted to be the perfect teacher. The color-coding fool who can instruct inside and out and never missed a beat. Instead I became the non-color coding crazy instructor who has never taught a lesson twice. I never miss a beat of the hearts in my class, and will stop a lesson in a moments notice if the real world comes raging through the hearts of my borrowed kids. Oh, I always circle back to the lesson, but I create a home first and education second. This cannot be learned but I took excerpts from good teachers I had in my childhood. Teachers that cared more about me than my scores. As for my clumping issues, I stood perfect for that moment and as for the student I only hope she had more teachers who opened their hearts and minds to her world. As for my newly borrowed kids they have a teacher who will always allow them to fix her lashes and listen. I think that is pretty perfect, even if my color-coding and data files are a bit off.

The above story is true and my little sweetie is a senior this year.