A very cool fact that I did NOT learn in my 9th grade Pre-AP Biology I class is that a woman who is pregnant is carrying the eggs of her future grandchildren.
That means that I (or half of me) was first exposed to the world of school in 1954, when my pregnant grandmother was teaching kindergarten. Her daughter – my mother – would become a teacher herself, and I can’t tell you how many weekends I played in her classroom while she prepared for her classes. Education was and is my mother’s vocation in the truest, Latinate sense of the word – her passion, her identity, her framework for making sense of the world.
So I like to joke to the parents who have come to visit my classroom on Open House that teaching, for me, is genetic. I have been steeped in the world of education for literally my entire existence. Over a Zoom meeting for a PD workshop, participants were asked to go around and introduce themselves by describing their hobbies. When it was my turn, I had to admit that I have no real hobbies outside of my work – just as it is for my mom, teaching and learning are just at the core of who I am.
But I have been delighted this past month to discover a dimension of the world of education totally unfamiliar to me up until now: the experience of being a parent in a school community.
My brave, funny, generous, strong sixteen-month-old daughter started pre-school in August. Although her school has the two highest accreditations for an early childhood care center, when we enrolled her, we weren’t thinking about the curriculum. It was really because I needed her to be supervised – by someone other than me – so that I could get my own work done. (A baby makes a delightful guest star but a distracting recurring feature on virtual classes.)
And yet in that time, I have been delighted to discover her discovering the world each day with the support and guidance of her teachers. “Did you know that she can’t use a fork?!” her teacher asked me on the first day that I picked her up from school. “Well she’s too young,” I explained. “I’ve tried to teach her and given up for now.” And yet later that week, as we were eating dinner, she stole my fork and began to gobble up her noodles (with a few spills). She knows the Chinese word for “clap,” she can wash her own hands, she has invented some of her own dances. I can take credit for precisely zero of these things, but I am chuffed nonetheless. What a wonder schools are to take our children and help them to become the fullest versions of themselves. What wisdom and experience and patience and humor these teachers must possess to be able to grow our littlest people so well.
We got a note from the school today that told us they would be hosting a virtual book fair and our teacher would be compiling a wish list of books that they would like to add to their classroom library, and I want to buy every single item for her. What a blessing to be able to rediscover the magic of school after spending my life in it.
Using My Teacher Voice 