Memories Teach

Friday, March 30, 2007
Memories Teach

“Mom, why do you keep that stuff? Why don’t you throw it ALL out,” my daughter queried as she watched me go through bin after bin of 28 years of teaching materials. I had already completed one purge two years ago when I retired from teaching. Now, with our garage burgeoning with household goods which had been demoted from their place in the house, here I was again, sorting and tossing.

I fumbled for words to respond to my daughter, “I might use it—might give it to someone…Well, your sister used a few things when she was teaching… uh…. it represents a lot of years of teaching….and-- I HAVE thrown the typing stuff away….” I added victoriously.”

“I guess you have a lot invested in it,” my daughter was helping me out.

I began to ask myself. Why don’t I just toss it all?

Then I realized that each sheet of paper is suffused with memory. As I toss out the aging purpled ditto masters, I can almost hear the chatter of teachers in the workroom during my first year of teaching. My heart is warmed by kind notes students wrote to their teaching “cadet” as we were then called. In was during my first week of student teaching that I knew for sure for the first time that I truly had a passion to teach.

As I read teaching notes on units I had forgotten I ever taught, I recall my youthful dreams when I believed that every student would even WANT to learn every thing I taught and would turn in every assignment. I smile remembering my first act of discipline the first day of school and my first year of teaching. A senior boy challenged me and I stood my ground though I was quaking inside. He later became one of my most enthusiastic students. I wonder where he is now?

Did I equip my students in any way to face the world as it is in 2007? I remember a theme song of one high school graduating class in those early teaching year: “We have high hopes, high in the sky apple pie hopes. . .” they sang as they filed into the assembly hall. I doubt my 80’s, 90’s or 2000 students would even get through the first line of such a song without a cynical remark. But then I wonder now if those 60’s kids realized their high hopes and golden dreams.

Going through old saved “Student Samples” of English assignments, I begin to see decades of teen faces: girls with beehive hairdo’s and short skirts, guys with flattops; girls with white lipstick and long hair, guys with hair almost as long; preppy guys in Izod shirts and Vans, girls in high heels and tennis shoes. Girls and guys in flip-flops and torn jeans.

I read numerous notes from students who were positively affected by a year in my classroom. I sift through years of costumed students photographed as they acted out Macbeth in my classroom. Why do I hold on to these bits of memory in paper form?

Sometimes I believe we feel that if we hold on to these memories we have a hold on a world that is slipping away from us. Sometimes it feels like our feet are planted on a sandy beach and life rises up around us and then recedes, pulling sand away beneath us and causing us to lose our footing as we face an ever-changing world.

There is something enriching about allowing the memories to flow—recalling a somewhat simpler time when we read more books, played more board games and mailed letters written by hand. My 60’s kids READ Lord of the Rings. My millennials watched the movies.

Memories also help us to see where we have been; what we have learned. They help us value those who have peopled our lives over the years. One of my sophomore students responded to an assignment with a poem which could have been written today.

Being sixteen is not really knowing
who you are or where you’re
going; but trying to convince
everyone that you do.

Being sixteen is not knowing who
you are, although the television
networks are always telling you what
goes on in the teenage mind.

Being sixteen is wanting excitement
and freedom; not someday, but NOW

Being sixteen is wanting to have
the privileges of an adult; but
having at the same time the
right to be a child: to cry and
run to one’s parents for help,
whenever the going gets rough.

--Carol N, May 22, 1967 “Sixteen”


This handwritten poem is a reminder that in many ways people struggle with the same things in every generation. They dream dreams, have aspirations, enjoy beauty, seek truth, experience pain.

So maybe I won’t toss out all my paper memories—not just yet.