Parents Made ALL the Difference

Can you correctly identify who is the student and who is the first year teacher?

(Don’t worry; most people can’t!)

I opened my “First Two Years of Teaching” box this summer for the first time in eighteen years. A friend asked me, “So, have you found anything in there of value?”

Have I ever! Photos and letters and programs and yearbooks and so many memories!

But one of the most valuable things I’ve found is intangible. It’s a truth I could not have known back then. I see it only now, with the distance of time, experience, and parenthood.

My first two years of teaching were magical. Sure, I experienced the normal frustrations of a newbie teacher; I actually found an apology card all the students signed the day after they were so mischievous that I left the class in tears! But as a whole, those two years are safely surrounded by a nirvana aura in my memory.

And I’ve always thought — naively and arrogantly — that I was the reason those two years were so good. I was young. Energetic. Optimistic.

I filled the shelves with books, many of them my own childhood copies.

I started a touring drama group.

I taught them great literature, dissection, and balanced chemistry equations.

I invited them over to my house where I fed them copious amounts of spaghetti while they played with my dogs and cats.

I took them on long snow hikes in the mountains.

The photos I’m putting into albums document all I did for and with my students. What the photographs don’t show is the real reason for “my” success as a newbie teacher.

The Reason for my Success

Ask yourself: Would I trust the pony-tailed blonde on the right to teach my 7th or 8th grade child?

Me neither.

Every time I look at this photo – which proves beyond any grandiose memory how very young and foolish I was those first two years – I am struck by a truth that I realize only now: the parents of my students made all the difference during my first two years of teaching.

What must they have thought when they came to meet the new teacher the first day of school and saw this baby-faced blonde? Why didn’t they grab their kids and run as fast as possible to a school that featured a real teacher?

Instead, they stayed, and they chose to trust me. To support me. And not just a little, not with reservations. They backed me 100% to my face and behind my back. All year long.

• Those shelves full of books? My room moms asked me for a list of the titles I wanted and held fundraisers to buy them.

• The touring drama group? Moms and dads with vans made the touring possible (and in many cases, made up 3/4 of the audience!)

• The great literature? My junior high kids could handle Charles Dickens because they’d been read to all their lives!

• Dissection? Several families donated everything needed.

• Balancing chemistry equations? No parent let a student get away with whining, “This is too hard! We shouldn’t be doing this in 7th grade!”

• The trips to my house and the mountains? Parents as chauffeurs, once again.

These parents did not support me because I had proved myself to be a good teacher. I became a good teacher because my students’ parents treated me with enormous trust, unconditional respect, and active support. I had done nothing to deserve any of these; they were gifts of grace.

As I read my students’ farewell letters to me, I know that I made a difference in their lives. That’s the ultimate goal, the highest achievement I’ve ever hoped for as a teacher: the privilege of making a difference in the life of a child. But I didn’t do it alone. And I couldn’t have done it alone.

The parents made all the difference.

For their children, “my” students.

And especially for me.