I’ll start by congratulating you on making it to the second week of the fall term. In these times, that’s an accomplishment. I also thought I would contribute a little something to your general sense of gratitude toward the cosmos — which, given the recent tricks Nature has been playing, could be a challenge — by pointing out that no matter what you’re facing as a teacher this fall, at least you don’t have me as one of your students.
The stories I could tell to underscore this gratitude are really too numerous, but I will share one illustrative anecdote from the beginning of seventh grade. I had a teacher for Life Sciences who, once we came to “an understanding,” would exert tremendous influence on my development. Mrs. Y was an ebullient African-American woman whose overflowing passion for biology was infectious. I don’t know what possessed her to give me this sort of ammunition in the second week of the term, but she asked my class to engage in a thought experiment:
Imagine what the world would be like today if whales had opposable thumbs.
My fellow students went to work, immediately dreaming up all sorts of utopian and dystopian presents for our species, while I mocked them with all the disdain at a 12-year-old’s command. I reserved my most caustic sarcasm for one group that solemnly declared that, armed with opposable thumbs, whales would have conquered the world and domesticated us, and we would live out our days as cattle, resigned to being eaten.
Mrs. Y called me down in mid-mockery to ask what, exactly, my problem was with my fellow students’ idea. “Well, it’s ridiculous, for a start — whales domesticating us for food.”
“Why is that ridiculous?” Mrs. Y demanded in a tone I would come to respect and even love.
“Look,” I said. “It all depends on where the opposable thumbs were.”
“What?” Sensing that I’d caught her off-guard, I moved in.
“Yeah. It all depends on where they were. If they had thumbs next to their blowholes, they’d never take over the world and domesticate us, because they’d be too busy making huge farting noises all day.”
Of course, I got a reliable laugh from most of the class — who wouldn’t laugh at someone using that word with a teacher of Mrs. Y’s reputation? — but in her eyes, I saw something I didn’t recognize.
“Get in the hall,” she ordered. I was experienced in this department, so I took a book with me.
Before long, Mrs. Y joined me, and I prepared to roll my eyes, as usual.
“I just have two things to say to you,” she said.
“Ok.” I still couldn’t make out that look.
“First, you are one clever guy. That was hilarious. And imaginative. I like your style.”
Needless to say, that wasn’t going as planned.
“Second — and I’m sure I don’t have to explain this to you — I can’t let it seem like I don’t have control of my class, right? So you are going to help me keep the peace. Deal?” She stuck out her hand, and I couldn’t think of anything to do except shake on it.
Over the coming weeks, Mrs. Y put me in charge of all sorts of wonderful biological things — like clearing up bits and pieces of dissections and washing scalpels and identifying organs and tissues that the sloppier students had dropped under lab tables. And I got to know her.
She had a MA in biology, she told me one day over a lunch-time dissection. (Yes, I did spend lunchtimes in her lab; she got the kitchen staff to let me take a tray, too.) But, she said, her real ambition had been medical school.
“What are you doing teaching junior high, then?” I asked her glibly, with all the unknowing naïveté of a 12-year old white kid of that time. And our time.
She said it was hard to explain, and then explained. As a black woman, she simply did not have the opportunity to do what she loved.
I was appalled. I even asked her if she was sure that that was “it” — as if she could possibly be mistaken. She was so kind with me. “No, that’s just the way it is,” she told me. The way it is.
As this sunk in, what I remember most is how angry I was, and how powerless I felt. But it was the beginning of a kind of awareness: I started to notice how people talked — or avoided talking — about others in my community. And I gradually realized that however angry I was at what I perceived as fundamentally wrong, it was merely the kind of anger you can have when you aren’t on the receiving end of that wrong.
Mrs. Y must have seen this going on in me. Much later that term, she reminded me of our medical school conversation and told me that teaching biology in junior high wasn’t a consolation prize. Her dream had been taken from her, and that’s the way it was. But, she said, a day would come when people of any color could do what they love, and she wanted to be part of that day.
Mrs Y made me realize that we can’t be powerless; each of us bears a heavy responsibility not to be powerless. You, and me.
I doubt I made Mrs. Y’s life as a teacher any better, but I can tell you that she made my life, as a human being, immeasurably better.
Sometimes, the second week of a term turns the world inside out. So, get out there and teach like the world depends on it.
