A toast to our teachers
It’s a good week to be a teacher, I told a friend the other night over dinner, my eyes filling up. She knew exactly what I meant, thank God, and promptly burst into tears.
What happened last Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was and remains terrible on every level, but for educators it is also akin to what 9/11 was to firefighters — an awful event that was a sharp reminder that the best of their breed is made of absolutely magnificent stuff.
When Dawn Hochsprung, Natalie Hammond and Mary Sherlach, respectively the Sandy Hook principal, viceprincipal and psychologist, heard the sounds of Adam Lanza shooting his way through the locked front doors of their school (and they clearly thought of it that way, as theirs to protect) they ran toward him.
Only Hammond returned alive.
Hochsprung, who was 47, actually lunged at the young man armed to the teeth.
First-grade teacher Victoria Soto, just 27, got some of her youngsters into a closet after the first shots rang out. The body of special-education teacher Anne Marie Murphy was found slumped over some of the murdered children — it appeared she had been trying to shield them. Kindergarten teacher Janet Vollmer locked her classroom door, covered the windows and took her kids into a nook between bookshelves and a wall, where she calmly read them a story.
Kristen Roig, another firstgrade teacher, got her kids into a bathroom, locked it and kept them quiet. Whenever one of them started crying, she told CNN.com, she would clasp the small face in her two hands and promise things would be all right.
“I wanted that to be the last thing they heard,” she said, “not the gunfire in the hall.”
Six staff — four teachers, as well as Hochsprung and Sherlach — were killed alongside 20 of their young charges. All were women. Those teachers who were luckier, whose classrooms weren’t under assault, nonetheless demonstrated remarkable grit and presence of mind.
Unexpectedly, through marathon training I took up late in life, I have ended up with a sizable contingent of educator friends.
Two are former principals who have moved up, though not as far as they ought to have given their smarts and ferocious dedication. Two are elementary schoolteachers and through one of them I have met two others.
I know a lot more today about teachers and education than I ever did before, and generally speaking I can write about none of it because my knowledge might compromise my friends or place them in the difficult position where they might be suspected of feeding me information.
Uncharacteristically, I’ve had to keep my mouth shut.
But what I’ve learned is that being in the classroom is probably more stressful and difficult now than ever before, and that more is expected of today’s teachers than ever was asked of mine.
With families absolutely fractured by divorce and career and self-fulfillment in ways that they weren’t when I was a child, the modern elementary schoolteacher is part psychologist, part childcare worker, part Big Sister, part cop and frankly, all too often, all parent.
Parent-teacher nights often tell the tale: The harried parent arrives and both teacher and parent discover the teacher knows far more about the kid than the parent does, and may even like him or her more.
And being out of the classroom is no better and no less fraught, because education is so hideously politicized, by board, government and union.
This week will see Super Tuesday in Ontario, with almost half the elementary schoolteachers in the province walking off the job.
For days, since the rotating strikes started and moved from board to board, always with 72 hours’ notice so parents had time to make the necessary arrangements, there has been an uncommon amount of whingeing in the media about the massive inconvenience and hardship. I’ve actually heard parents interviewed on the radio bitterly complaining they will have to take a day off work.
Now, I’m no expert on the forces that brought Ontario’s teachers to this point, though as a casual observer I’d note that it looked early on as though the Dalton McGuinty government was trying to provoke a fight with them. But I know this: If I were a parent with a child at one of the eight public school boards where teachers will be on strike today, I’d hunt me down one of the picket lines (not every school will have them), and I’d take a great whack of coffee and doughnuts to those teachers, and I’d say, ‘look, I don’t know squat about your fight with the government. But this once, thanks for all you do for my kid, and the other kids.’
And I’d offer a toast to their fallen colleagues to the south of us.