A Changing Year

I am a teacher, a facilitator of knowledge, a mentor, a role model, a parent, a friend.  My role is ever changing.  What I am to one student, I may not be to another.  It depends on the student.

When I was in school, teachers were authority figures; they were revered and feared. We were not ever sure they were human.  Did they sleep?  Did they live at the school, hiding away in some secret passage while devising more plans of torture for us?  I can’t recall ever seeing a teacher in the grocery store.  I knew they ate, I saw them in the cafeteria, - maybe that was the only time.  And, what was it like to have a parent who was a teacher?  The word that came to mind was mortifying!  Now that I am a teacher, the word is fantastic!

I did my best to keep a low profile.  Don’t talk, don’t tell, and don’t call attention to yourself.  That is how I made it through the first four years of elementary school. 

Then something wonderful happened.  I was promoted to Miss Wanda Morrell’s fifth grade class.  This was during the time when teachers still did home visits. ( I cannot imagine that in this culture.)  Miss Morrell came to visit my mother and me on a sunny July day.  She had called a few days before to set up the meeting.  Mama had scrubbed our small home until it shone.  Even the front porch was scrubbed in those days. 

She arrived on a walker.  She explained she had fallen and broken a hip and would be on the walker for quite some time.  Then she explained that she had a problem.  Our classroom was on the second floor, which required a climb up two flights of concrete stairs.  She would need someone to meet her at her car each morning, get the room key and carry her belonging up to the room.  Then bring the key back to her while she did her morning duties.  Then she asked, “Sherry, would you be willing to do that for me?”  She looked me straight in the eye when she asked. 

Of course I said, "Yes!"  What was this?  A teacher, one of the elite, had noticed this shy, over-weight child, and was not repulsed?  She did not look at me as if I was a disappointment?  I did not know what to think.  Little did I know this woman would influence me to become the teacher I am today.

Our classroom that year was enormous.  It was rectangular with “coat closets” in the back.  The outer wall was windowed, and the interior wall near the hallway was covered with a long bulletin board.  The front wall was all long black chalkboards.  In the middle were our desks, all 31 of them.  Under the windows were bookcases with encyclopedias and dictionaries; an aquarium and a pencil sharpener were near the end of shelves.  That room became my haven from the bullying I experienced at the hands and mouths of kids my own age and older.  It is hard being fat, no matter when or where you live. 

It also became the place, I learned to play the autoharp, heard my voice on a tape  recorder for the first time, looked into a microscope to see what lived in pond water, studied geography outside under the large oaks that graced the old school campus. We had field trips to Mr. Cope’s book store, the post office, and down on Crockett Creek looking for salamanders and hoping we did not find any snakes. 

In the spring of that year, we came in one morning to find a full size loom set up in the back of our classroom.  That spring, we learned to weave.  We added woven lines on tea towels for our moms for Mother’s Day. 

We painted a mural on the long bulletin board.  The theme: “What we do for fun!” There were tempera paintings of families, baseball games, characters throwing footballs, basketballs, fishing, riding bikes, and sitting under trees reading.

That year, we transversed the globe and our small town, because one teacher deemed us worthy.    That year, we were all equal in that classroom.  We were friends.  Some of those friendships still exist almost fifty years later.  How can you put a price on such a special experience? 

Lots of water has traveled down Crockett Creek, and our small town has seen prosperity and hardships since those years in Miss Morrell’s fifth grade class, but one thing has not changed.  If adults gave those different children half a chance to feel normal, the outcome might amaze the world, even if that world is one of their own making.