What could cause a 72-year-old person to “want” to get up and go to a ten-hour workday? Simple… it’s a “calling” to do my best to provide what I consider to be an appropriate education for children. We read about problems in schools across the country, and we shake our heads. We’ve come to call our school “the common sense” school. Many causes can be found for problems in our nation’s schools, but experience also tells me a lot of it can be traced to a lack of common sense. As Pogo once mused, “We’ve met the enemy…and the enemy is us!”
My career has been filled with successes and wonderful experiences. I have served on many Oklahoma State Department of Education committees, a special committee of the Governor, and been elected state president of the Oklahoma Association for Gifted, Creative and Talented. One extremely enjoyable appointment was to a consortium of state leaders for Arts for the Gifted which met in California.
But none of the above can tell you why I do what I do each and every school day. To know the answer to that question, one would have to live what I have experienced. I have held a crying child as I had to break the news to him that his little brother set fire to the family trailer and his sister was burned to death. Likewise, I also took care of a child whose mother was stabbed to death in a horrible bank robbery. I tried to console my newly hired teaching assistant as we watched helplessly while people tried to find her husband’s body in the lake where his military company was having a family picnic. He tried to save the life of a drowning soldier, only to lose his own…while his children watched.
I taught a slow-growth child who clapped with joy as she learned to read…ever so slowly. Even though progress was being made, I watched as family members had her placed in an institution because the psychologist said she’d never be able to learn. Many were the students of abuse who confided in me and trusted that I would help them. Some have come to me in later years and explained why some days were just so “bad” but they couldn’t put it into words. Yet, I had given them hope.
On the positive side, I have been thrilled to hear from previous students who took my challenges and found themselves successfully teaching in inner-city schools. Others have found careers that are most satisfying, and they write to tell me I had a part in their journey.
I have attended the funerals of quite a few previous students. I think I know of at least eleven who have met death. With each day, I ask myself if I did a good enough job of teaching them the academics while also preparing them to meet their Maker at death’s door. I hope I did. And when I recognize students taking a path that has led others to unrewarding lives, I try hard to steer them toward a better path.
Today, in Lawton Academy, there is at any one time children studying together in the same classrooms who come from countries all over the world. Their countries may be at war, or playing politics as usual, but they are joined in the common experience of being educated in our classrooms. A sign has hung in my office from time to time which says: “Will it matter that I was here? I will only pass this way once.” That is why I teach and do what it is that I do.
- Kay