The Cliche

I visited my best friend's family Monday for Labor Day; I had promised to take her two daughters to the park and generally wanted to spend time with the parents, too. Lives become busy. To keep friendships, we have to work at it.

We had offered to do anything the girls wanted to do--visit the zoo, the petting zoo. I would have been willing to drive to an amusement park. They wanted a picnic at a local park. Our total costs: bread and peanut butter. As a poor nontraditional college student, I can't afford to say no to those prices.

After the park and many, many coloring books later, the adults decided to watch a movie. Because two rugrats were around, and because apparently watching High School Musical is no more fun the 800th time than it is the first, our options were somewhat limited. The parents decided they wanted to watch "Freedom Fighters." I settled in for yet another movie about how wonderful it is to teach, about all the perils of teaching kids who don't want to be there, and for becoming victorious despite the odds.

I was right and wrong.

See, we've been inundated thanks to movies like Mr. Holland's Opus (which really isn't that great, thankyouverymuch) and Dangerous Minds that a great teacher will swoop in and beat the odds, showing kids that he or she really loves them while sacrificing everything near and dear to the teachers' hearts. It's become cliche.

But the cliche is true. That's why it works.

A few years ago, after my divorce, I was dating this guy, Tim. Tim was separated or divorced; I never really heard the whole story. He was doing military school for becoming an Army medic while we were dating and would, once in a while, visit me while I was at work to do some studying of his own. His schedule was tight, my schedule was tight, but we tried, as much as two screwed up invididuals could.

One week prior to a Saturday he had off, he mentioned some plans he was making for the two of us. I told him that because finals were coming up, I had told my students I was going to be on campus from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. should any of them want or need me to look at papers, answer questions, help them with anything, etc. After that, I needed to do some work for preparing for the next week's classes.

"That's ridiculous! You shouldn't do that."

To say I was confused would be an understatement. "I shouldn't do what?"

"Your job isn't that important."

"Uh...what?"

"My job is more important than yours."

"Ok. But I'm not available Saturday, since I'll be in the library. If no one shows up, fine, but I'll be there. And if someone does show up, great, because I'll be there and that one person will know that someone cares. If you don't like it, you can leave. Of that, I do not care."

As it turned out, only one student did show up, around 11 a.m. on a cold December Saturday morning. But One Student Did show up, and I was there. My relationship with Tim didn't last much longer; we had problems outside of weird work schedules, but telling me that because he held a gun, his job was more important than mine was definitely the beginning of the end.

My job isn't going to ever pay me as much monetarily as the actors who portray teachers make. I've lost two relationships because of teaching--one with my ex husband, who was jealous that I made more money than his blue-collared job offered him, and Tim, who was jealous that he would not have all of my attention. I don't always get enough sleep, especially when I'm grading papers at 4 a.m. because I want to write comments to all of my students so they understand what they did right and how they can work on improving for the future.

But what I get out of this job is more special to me than anyone will ever know.

Elizabeth is a student I taught this summer in a remedial class; she's a cute little blonde with blue eyes and a sweet, shy smile. Her first essay was so difficult to read that I spent two hours on it alone, trying to decipher what she meant and what I could direct her to work on first, as there was so much to work on. There was no thesis, no organization. Worse, every sentence was an incomplete sentence. Worse still, her spelling indicated someone who had severe dyslexia.

I was only to be teaching her for five weeks; should she not pass my class, she would not be returning to school.

She also had a reading class that she had to pass in order to stay in the program. Because she was having such problems with writing, I had a very bad feeling about her reading comprehension. Sadly, I was correct in my assumption.

Instead of giving up on her because it wasn't my problem, I decided to combine the reading class into the writing class, work on a lot of individual skill sets, set up peer tutoring groups, and work with students on a one-on-one basis in class. This was not easy and for five weeks this past summer, I never did sleep more than four hours a night.

At the end of the summer, after assigning the last writing assignment for the session, we were sitting in class, me reading while they were working on portfolios/last minute corrections/the last writing assignment. An hour into the class, Elizabeth walked over to me with a two page essay she had hand written; it still needed work, and she knew this, but she wanted to make sure this draft was on the right path.

I read the two page essay; the introduction grabbed my attention because it was interesting and had a thesis. The paragraphs were organized and stayed on topic. Each sentence was complete and I did not see any misspelled words.

I looked at Elizabeth, trying to hold back my tears. "My God, Elizabeth. This is beautiful."

She smiled, took her paper back, returned to her seat and continued to work.

Monetarily rich, never. But I never wanted money to begin with.