Note # 25 – The Business of Creating Beauty

In September of 1996, I published my first ever piece with the Globe and Mail.  It was basically a love letter to teaching.  I read it over the other day to see if the writing held up and if I still felt the same way about teaching.

It did and I do.

This is for my colleagues.  

Happy First Day to you all.

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I love my job.

I am sitting on the floor of my classroom, which is unnaturally quiet. It is late August and the afternoon sun pouring in the windows is making it unbearably hot. I’m cutting red paper into shapes that I hope resemble apples, so that I can hang them on the construction paper tree that’s taped to the door. Later, I will inscribe the names of my seven students on the apples, so that the morning after Labour Day, when we climb the stairs to begin our ten month journey together, they will see their names on the door and know that I expected them, that I’m glad they’re here, that we all belong to each other now.

I only need seven apples, because I teach a special group of children and the class size is restricted by the Ministry of Education.  The label they are given varies from year to year, but the sadness and rage in their eyes does not. They are called emotionally disturbed, difficult, violent, and unteachable. They are usually unwanted and almost always afraid.

All the apples are cut out now, and in a flash of artistic inspiration, I decide to trace the edges with a marker to make them stand out more. I made a tree like this one last year, laboured over it for an entire afternoon. The second week of September, one of my students ripped it off the door and tore it to shreds before he ran out of the classroom, screaming that he hated this place and that no one could make him come back. I smile remembering it now, because he did come back with only a little coaxing.  And in a few months he started to read, mastered the dreaded nine times table, and earned himself a spot on the track and field team. He even smiled occasionally.

When I tell people about my job, about the violent outbursts, the troubled homes and the myriad day to day struggles and frustrations that are part of working with these kids, they often shake their heads and ask how I can do it.  Some days, I ask myself the same thing, and in the weeks between September and January, I ask it often, because I’m convinced that I’m not helping any of them, that there’s been no progress. It took me a few years in this assignment to learn that teaching is like building a house: you can’t do anything until you’ve dug the basement and built a solid foundation.  And building a good foundation takes time.

One of my friends, a litigator with a Bay St. law firm, who regularly eats young, inexperienced lawyers for breakfast, once told me that he wouldn’t last two days at my job. He, like many of my friends from university, has taken other career paths and I often wonder what they get out of their jobs. How can they possibly do what they do, day after day, commuting to their office towers, slaving over paper, scrambling to get a foot up on the next rung, counting the months until partnerships? Don’t they know what they’re missing? Every day, I get to share in the progress and achievements of a group of children who know that the odds are against them and who learn anyway. I get to experience their joy as the world opens up before their eyes and they discover that, despite what they may have heard elsewhere, they are important and worthwhile. I paint and I sing and I get to read student-authored stories where the bully (a T. Rex with an attitude) is defeated by a little dragonfly who used his brain to make a difference. (This, from a ten year old boy who, on the first day in my class, introduced himself to me by saying, “Hi, I’m Ron. I don’t do reading.”)

My grandmother was a teacher for thirty nine years, and even now, after her death, her former students stop me on the street to talk about the year they spent in her class. Some of them are retired and have grandchildren now, but their eyes shine when they talk about the impact that she had on them. She taught everything from Algebra to woodworking, but no matter what the subject was, all of her students left her class having learned the same thing: self respect. For some of them, it was the first time they’d felt it.  They tell me it affected their whole lives.

That’s why I love my job. Because teaching is the most inherently hopeful act that I know of. It says, “You’ve got it within in you to succeed in life, to be happy and to be proud of yourself.  No matter what anyone has told you, no matter what you believe right now, you’ve got it.”

Some will say that I’m an idealist, and that I should accept the realities of the world that these children will inherit. But if teaching doesn’t call for idealism, then what profession does? Why would you ever stay in the classroom if you didn’t believe in your heart that “reality” isn’t necessarily the way things have to be? The kids who make up my classes each year are kids who have had the hope beaten out of them. If it makes me an idealist to think that nine years old is too early to have given up on life, then I’ll bear the title proudly.

A very wise person once told me that the word “teaching” is just a short form for “being in the business of creating beauty.” Maybe the best way to prepare this generation of children for the brutal realities that await them is to teach them how to create beauty in their own lives. Surely the world couldn’t help but be transformed by a wave of idealistic souls who practice  the gentle crafts of peacemaking, nurturing, poetry and dreaming.

But how do you go about creating an idealist?

It’s just like building a house. First, you have to build a strong foundation. Use sturdy bricks like self-knowledge, self-respect, compassion, honesty and hope.  To ensure that the foundation is true, check it frequently against the plumb line of a loving example and then stand back.

The rest of the house will build itself.