So here's the short of it,
Today I want to say thank you to a young girl.
And here's the long.
I don't remember your name.
I was a young teacher. It was my first full year of teaching and I was working as a Language Arts teacher at Tabernacle Elementary outside Covington, TN in an elementary school - I had the 7th and 8th graders. I thought I was pretty good - and I worked hard to make lessons that would be meaningful. So naive!
You missed lots of school.
Most of the parents in this community were sharecroppers. Yours were. You were the oldest child, I think. And come the month of October I only saw you on days when the rain was pouring down. Your shoes were always caked with mud, and your thin dress would be wet from the rain soaking through your coat while you waited on the bus. It took me until the end of the year to understand that October was the month of harvest and you were staying at home to take care of your younger siblings or working in the fields. The county had only recently implemented a conventional calendar. Just a few years before school would have been closed for the whole month of October so that all the students could help with the harvest. You were needed at home. This happened again in the spring when planting time came around. I didn't really understand.
You were pretty quiet.
You didn't really have lots to say. I wasn't very skilled at manipulating classroom discussions and I could have done a much better job of drawing you in and making sure you had opportunities to share. I had a small collection of books that were our classroom library - you always had one checked out as well as one from the library.
You always tried to get work in that you had missed.
You seemed eager to learn. You were probably overwhelmed with trying to keep up with everything that you were responsible for as well as keeping up with your school work so that even though you didn't stay caught up, you tried your best. If I had been more experienced and if I had known what you were experiencing in your life, I might have been able to send home enough work to let you stay caught up.
You were back in school when we read an excerpt from Richard Wright's
Black Boy. This excerpt is a searing description of hunger.
"Hunger stole upon me so slowly that at first I was not aware of what hunger really meant. Hunger had always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly. The hunger I had known before this had been no grim hostile, stranger; it had been a normal hunger that had made me beg constantly for bread, and when I ate a crust or two I was satisfied. But this new hunger baffled me, scared me, made me angry and insistent...I would feel hunger nudging my ribs, twisting my empty guys until they ached. I would grow dizzy and my vision would dim. I became less active in my play, and for the first time in my life had to pause and think of what was happening to me."
I probably couldn't have assigned a more insensitive reading - although I believed that I was providing a culturally sensitive readings - as I was taught in teacher preparation - literature that would offer something my students could relate to.
You loved to write.
You loved to write and I never had to push you to express yourself.
After we read the Black Boy excerpt and discussed it in class, you were to write a response. I sat down to grade them - there on my sofa in my nice 2 bedroom apartment with a hot cup of coffee - my feet propped up on my coffee table and that proverbial red pen in my hand. I had probably read 6 or 8 essays before I got to your paper. I don't remember your whole response. Here's what I do remember;
You said
"I've been hungry before, but I've never been as hungry Richard was. The longest time I've ever been without food is from lunch at school on Friday til breakfast at school on Monday at the end of the month when we don't have any money or food."
I left Tabernacle Elementary at the end of that year. You were going on to the high school. I don't know what happened to you. I often wonder about your life. Were you able to move out of the poverty that gripped your family and much of your community in the late 70's? I would love to know because I would love to tell you thank you.
You taught me so much more than I could have ever dreamed of teaching you.
You planted a seed that would take a long time to find fertile ground. But I think of you often and when I do your memory gives me a renewed passion for the work that I have found to do in this world.
HaHaHa. I just looked up the lyrics for the Disney song from Snow White. On the website I found the lyrics are not about going to work! They are, "It's home from work we go". That's so funny to me. By the time the day is over - well most days anyway, I'm not feeling like singing. But I think I'm going to start trying to have a singing attitude! After all, I'm going home! I was just sure they said It's off to work we go! I'll bet if I looked at a few more lyrics sites I'd find some that supported the off to work we go!! 