Today's Daily Lesson comes from the teacher's bathroom at Anderson Elementary:
Yesterday I stopped off in the faculty unisex bathroom while on my weekly mentoring visit at Alderson Elementary School and discovered something surprising and wonderful, at least as far as elementary bathrooms go anyways.
I have volunteered at Alderson and it's predecessor Parkway Elementary for six years. Over the years I've had three children as mentees, a brother and a sister and a new mentee whom I'm just getting to know. These kids come from hard neighborhoods with challenging and stressed home lives. The families of everyone of my kids has loved their child dearly. Still, the opportunities these kids have a minimal, the home life is often stressful. And the classroom is filled with 20 other kids walking to school from the same difficult circumstances of home.
After six years of showing up I know the names and stories of many of the other kids besides mine. I know the ones whose fathers are in prison. I know the ones whose cousins were murdered. I know who just got back from burying their mother. I pray for them.
And I pray also for the faculty and staff. I am amazed at the beginning of every school year to see their faces once again. They could be somewhere else -- another school. But they are here, at this school with these kids and their stories. I wonder how they do it. How do they keep showing up? How do they remain? How do they keep from just losing it when the kids bring all the chaos from home into the classroom?
And that's what was so wonderful about what I discovered on the wall in the bathroom. Taped next to the light switch was a quote by someone named Haim Ginott:
"I’ve come to a frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather . . . I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized."
I do not who Haim Ginott is. I do not know if he is a Democrat or a Republican, socialist, capitalist, communist, animal, vegetable, or mineral. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because I already know the one truly important thing. And the really important thing is this: That somewhere in that school there is at least one person who is self-aware, whose eyes are open, who is not afraid to look at and reflect upon his or her own beautiful and/or frightening truth. There is at least one person who believes in what Plato said, that "the unexamined life is not worth living." I know there is one person over there off Parkway Drive in East Lubbock, Texas who believes these kids deserve someone standing before them in their classroom who is striving to be and do his or her very best -- striving to be good. And in reading the little sign posted there with Haim Ginott's words I know this one person believes it all so much that she or he is is willing to do something seemingly small yet very significant to try to get all the others to believe it and see it all too.
And the word for that person in the English language is called "teacher".
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