Love-ability

As a teacher, I just-about always found lots of lovable in the students in my classes. Teaching is a profession that attracts all kinds of people, especially mama types like me--especially in public school education.  

On the first day of class, I sat them in a circle and we got to know each other, pretty sure an activity of less appeal to my math and biology colleagues. In that first hour together,  I sat back and soaked them up, taking note of what interested them, memorizing their names, knowing that to proceed we had to stumble upon common bonds to proceed with a semester--or in the case of middle and high school students, an entire year.

Over the course of our time together, there were favorites I still remember.  With a few, intimacies shared in their writing touched me and made them memorable. I loved a lot of kids along the way.

Some called teaching a profession with way more "psychic income" than monetary rewards. For mama types, fair enough at the time.  Whetting students' appetites for words, observing progress in their ability to connect them into sentences and paragraphs was rewarding.  But without partners with larger paychecks, most of us couldn't have survived on our pathetic salaries.  I often mused that the university spent more on a couple of flower beds than on the salaries of freshman comp. teachers.

Years after teaching middle school, I got a Christmas call from a former student, by then in the Navy, stationed somewhere overseas.  "I ain't never had a teacher as good as you," he said--no testament to my teaching of grammar, but when he elaborated on that point, it was clear that he remembered that I laughed at his jokes and cared about him. 

A recent episode of "Unsung Heroes" (NPR) summed up my philosophy about people back then: 

After 9/11, the speaker found that she was terrified of flying for years.  She was suspicious of strangers and terrorism and airplanes. 

One day, she had to fly somewhere.  Even before take-off, she was wringing her hands, her breathing shallow.  When the stranger sitting beside her struck up a conversation, she told him why she was so afraid. That conversation changed her life, she said. 

It was just four words, really, that changed her life: "Most people," he said, "are good."

This man probably has no memory of speaking those words, yet she said it changed her outlook and the way she parented her children.  Now, instead of fearing the terrible, she looks for the good. 

I still want to agree with Anne Frank--that "most people are basically good. But I don't rock-solid believe it anymore.  That half of our voters would elect Donald Trump, not once but twice, has shaken so many foundations that my brain probably looks like rubble in a war zone. 

I won't elaborate, or we'd be here all day.

When I'm trying to feel generous of spirit or wiser than I am, I try to imagine Donald Trump as somebody's first grader.  I try to think of him as somebody's little boy, maybe a trouble maker or a bully but reachable at least. Surely, I tell my former-teacher self, there is something to like about him. I could take him aside during lunch and we could talk about empathy and manners maybe? 

I'm not that wise or generous of spirit.