The Gift
On the last day of fourth grade, I leaned against a window as my fellow students buzzed around our classroom, high on sodas and celebration and the delight of having our beloved teacher back: she had been out for more than five months while her husband struggled through the last stages of a fatal illness. He had, in the final few days of that spring, passed away. Our substitute teacher had been nice, but she was no Mrs. Sieg — no second mother, no kind, patient lady with a generous smile and a ballerina bun. Only on that last day were we ever permitted to see Mrs. Sieg’s hair loose, despite months of pleading; as she pulled the pins and we howled with excitement, her hair toppled down her back, a silver river that streamed nearly to her knees.
With a few expert flicks of her wrist, she twisted her hair back up into its accustomed place, the chaos resumed, and she suddenly gestured to me to follow her. Surprised, I slipped out the door with her and into the hall.
Once there, she pressed a tiny book into my hand. Squeezing my hand softly for emphasis, she looked at me gravely with her dark grey eyes. “Don’t tell the others,” she said, “I don’t have presents for them, but I want you to have this. I want you to read what I wrote to you and I want you to remember it.” With a soft smile and a final squeeze, she returned to the classroom, leaving me in the quiet hall.
I opened the book. Its cover was made of scarlet paper, the handmade kind, the pages bleached and blank. On the second was a poem that I’d written at the start of the semester. Mrs. Sieg had typed it up and pasted it carefully into the book. Next to the poem, tucked into the crease of the binding, was a folded slip of paper. I uncurled it and began to read. “Never forget that you are a writer. You have begun to discover that about yourself this year. When times are hard, write. I want you to have this book so you can write about it all, so you can write about everything, here.”
My eyes swelled. Fourth grade had been unexpectedly hard, marked by the implosion of my parents’ marriage, the death of my best friend’s mother, the awkwardness of blooming long before the others and long before I was ready, the cruelty of other kids. I had told her none of this, and yet it seemed that even in her absence she had witnessed it all.
That, for me, is what makes a teacher great. The very best teachers I’ve seen have all had one skill in common–they are great observers. They listen, they watch, and they learn; and then they take all that they’ve observed and distilled and hand it back to their students, transformed. Perhaps all that watching is how they figure out how to best help others learn, how they become exemplary storytellers. At its core, it helps them recognize the power at the heart of each student, so that when they tell that student, “I see you. I see how you are struggling, I see the promise and the hope that you offer, and I know that you can realize that promise,” what they say rings true — even to the most terrified and demoralized individual. By paying attention and giving that student what scholar Michael Hyde has called “the life giving gift of acknowledgement,” they can fan a spark, empowering that student to develop into her very best self, and giving a gift that will forge the scholar she becomes.
