She is older. Past retirement age. She stands in the Walmart checkout lane with a full cart. In her basket: Kleenex, paper towels, notebooks, number-two pencils, Scotch tape, staples. The works.
She teaches ninth grade. And she’s been doing this for thirty years.
That’s three decades of lesson plans, spitballs, my-Labrador-ate-my-homeworks, senior pranks, and pep-rallies. She is a living saint.
“When I was young,” she says. “Had this idea I was going to be a wonderful teacher and change the world.”
Her first year of teaching nearly killed her.
Ninth-graders are their own breed of domestic skunk. The children drained her youth and drove her toward a nervous breakdown.
“Almost gave up,” she says. “I actually wrote a letter of resignation after my first year. It was that bad.”
It was that bad. But she didn’t quit.
There was a girl in her class. The girl’s mother had died. She had no father. She was living with relatives.
The girl was quiet. Sad. She didn’t try in class.
She had no friends. She was a D-student, a poor reader, and a lost child.
“I knew she needed me. So I told myself, ‘I’m gonna win this girl over if it’s the last thing I do.’”
She worked with the child after school hours. She ordered pizza delivery while they studied. She introduced the girl to the simple pleasures of Nancy Drew, and helped her with math homework.
She listened. Sometimes all she did was listen.
“That’s when I realized, maybe I’ll never change the world, but I can be a friend. I could show her I didn’t care about her grades as much as I cared about her.”
The girl’s grades improved. In fact, that year she made A’s in…