Fighting failure

Teachers can easily tell you about the worst days they’ve had in their careers, but the best days take some thinking. It’s not that teachers share viral pessimism or lurch toward worst-case scenarios. It’s that the bad days are generally few, making them easy to pick out. The best days? Asking a teacher to choose his or her best day is like asking a longtime jeweler to pick his favorite diamond.

August always brings a round of best-day recollections to mind. Even in the middle of a pandemic and such paralyzing uncertainty, the best days easily appear like old friends on a sidewalk. We greet those memories with mental embraces that provide fuel for the coming year. With an unclear forecast, those good memories are invaluable this year.

On opening day, I tend to watch the newly minted freshmen enter the school building. They’re always a gangly lot, squirrelly and immature for the most part. They’re launching from big man on campus to low man on the totem pole over just a few summer months. They don’t know what they don’t know, displaying a combination of real fear and shallow confidence.

What they generally don’t grasp is that the year ahead will be a series of failures and finest moments. And, almost always, one is needed before finding the other.

I sifted through these August recollections the other day, thinking about a student from a few years ago. He had asked for a recommendation letter, one he’d use as proof that he was of good character, a hard worker, and would be a benefit to any organization that took a chance on him. I ticked through his history.

This student had appeared late in the game, about mid-August before his freshman year. Registration was over, classes set. His grandfather had the boy in tow, wanting to enroll him. The boy was small and quiet, his eyes tired but expectant. Teachers can easily pick out kids like him, ones that have an unseen wound, ones that won’t bother opening up.

The grandfather explained that the boy’s mother had an addiction problem and was out of the picture. He had tried to live with his father, but a construction job and alcohol abuse had kept the father from being around much. So, the grandfather said, the boy had come to live with him and his wife.

I remember nodding at the story. Like so many other kids his age, the boy was lucky he had strong grandparents that would act as loving parents, though they were a bit older than most of the other families in the boy’s grade. All teachers see this, and I became comfortable with the narrative, noting that despite some hard times, the boy would be okay.

Then, the story got worse. The grandmother was the matriarch, the mooring point that connected everyone. She mothered the boy, demanded much of him, nurtured and challenged him in that strong feminine way with its uniquely positive impact on young males. She became his confidante and task master. She was his mother in every sense of the word.

Then, a vicious disease struck her and she faltered. Within months, she was gone. Grandfather struggled. The boy experienced loss once again. I started to say something, but the boy’s look stopped me. Yes, his eyes were weary. But that expectation within them was as clear as a morning sky. He wanted something and wouldn’t rest until he found it.

Good teachers remain intrigued by the twin masters of failure and finest moments, and how easily school kids can experience and conquer each. Self-inflicted failures sting but sometimes life piles the weight of others’ failures on the shoulders of its children. What a heavy burden to carry on those small bodies. But then, with the right environment, the right influences at the right time, those little frames can bear the weight of the world, heaving more than Atlas ever imagined. It takes good teachers to do that. Not commissioners, not superintendents, and certainly not principals. It takes the men and women who show up in the classroom in person or onscreen.

The boy grew up and worked hard. He earned his high school diploma and had a scholarship to higher education where he continued to excel. I wrote that recommendation during his last year of college. I told the committee that any medical school would be lucky to have him.

The boy had decided that he could help someone else’s mother heal, someone else’s father find the right path. He had decided that he could tend to someone else’s strong grandmother and make sure that strength remains invincible.

August brings a New Year’s Day of sorts to educators. The old year is gone, though its memories linger in every whisper. But the coming year is an avalanche about to fall, a cascade of interaction that will tumble forward in all its ordered glory.

This new term has already seen its troubles, its failures rooted in uncertainty and fear. But just wait for the teachers to get hold of these troubling days. Sooner or later, they’ll be there to help our youth navigate their failures and illuminate their finest moments.

You see, that boy had every reason to hate his life, to hate the world, to hate God. He could have wallowed in that mess, seeking its depths instead of searching for a way out. But he rose. He shouldered the burden and moved forward.

The best days in a school? They happen when teachers play the dual role of receptive confidante and active guide to children in need. They happen when teachers help kids fight off the darkness of failure with the light of finest moments to come.