8.
My daughter shared a picture of a valentine she received from one of her 4th grade students, whom she described as being "hyper-observant" because it was a box of chocolates that looked exactly like my daughter's electric guitar -- the strings on the front were even playable!
(Here I'll interject that the fact she had already tried it and took particular delight in its playability tells you things about my daughter. She's never opened a pair of anything without putting them on and wearing them immediately. By Christmas afternoon, she is enthusiastically decorated. It makes her the best sort of person to give a gift.)
Her student may or may not have above average observational skills, but one thing I see for sure is that the student is having a positive school year with a memorable teacher about whom he/she will always remember that she played the electric guitar and shared herself with her students, inspiring them to the point of wanting to find just the right valentine to demonstrate and further cement the identification.
Her students are largely ESL students from homes on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, so it probably took some doing for that large guitar-ish box to show up on the teacher's desk.
I had a teacher in 4th grade to whom I might have liked to give such a special valentine. Not because I had a crush on her, but because she was the teacher who first Alerted Me to My Possibilities. She seemed a light at the end of my dark tunnel. There had been some difficult things going on at home, and at the time I felt cut off from the beckoning world that I perceived my friends to be moving into with excitement and ease. I wasn't sure what life was going to offer me in terms of opportunities or potential or futures. I was only pretty sure that the world didn't feel quite as friendly to me as it seemed to be for the other kids in the room.
And then I met my 4th grade teacher. She saw something in me, or seemed to, that I didn't see in myself. Something that nobody seemed to notice in 3rd grade. She seemed to think I was nothing but potential. She didn't seem to have any idea that I was struggling to find a way to not only fit, but also find a place to go.
She didn't treat me like a misfit, but like a leader. It was baffling to me, frankly. I wondered where she got these ideas about me?
And then, by about midway through the year, I stopped wondering how she came by her misconceptions and instead began to chart a course based on the way I felt she viewed me, rather than the way I did. For many years after, I would think to myself, "Well, Mrs. Spackman would probably think I could do this. So I probably can."
She never had any idea the effect she had on me. I wish she did. She changed the trajectory of everything that came after. And it wasn't because she was hip or cool or beautiful or played an electric guitar. She was none of those things. It was because of the way she saw me and the way she allowed me to see myself. Game changer.
I've noticed my teacher daughter spends a good deal of time worrying about the ways in which teachers are measured and whether her students will be able to perform on the required tests. She's forever having to prove her worth. It seems to demand enough of her time and mental energy that it can only be a drain that adversely affects the amount of herself she is able to devote to the students she serves. But because I know she's the kind of teacher who is never going to shortchange the kids where it counts, it has affirmed to me that we're making a huge mistake and actually working against our stated goals. This aspect of our education system has turned our country's most underpaid job into our country's most overworked, misunderstood, underpaid job.
The other day, she offered as an anecdote the fact that she had a student throwing up during the all-important standardized tests. It's unlikely a student's scores from such a miserable day will be an accurate reflection of anything that could be tested by filling in an oval. Will the school be designated as worthy of funding? (All schools are worthy of funding. They are the places we send our children to allow them to dream and then become.) Will the students pass the tests? (Tests are a poor measure of what any human being has truly absorbed or is capable of achieving. People are wholly comprised of the variables that numbers cannot represent.) Will her teaching be deemed successful? (I'd offer as Exhibit A the guitar-shaped box of chocolates, which I think tells what a test never will.)
I'm pretty sure she's already succeeded.