Spoken from the Heart (15 page)

I loved my students. I was just twenty-one when I entered that fourth-grade classroom, and my students in so many ways taught me. I had only twenty in my class, a luxury at a time when many public schools had upwards of thirty or forty students in a single room. My classroom was on the first floor, with windows all along one side because there was no air-conditioning. We opened the glass and hoped for a breeze. It was in that school in the September heat, as sweat glued my blouse to my back, that I felt the physical demands of teaching, six hours or more on my feet, standing at the blackboard, on the recess blacktop, or in the cafeteria as students navigated the lunch lines and downed their meals. And I had to keep their attention, by myself, alone.

The realities of an elementary school classroom are far from the Hollywood romance of tweedy academics or wisecracking professors. The movies can condense an entire school career into a little over two hours. That doesn't take most teachers even through the morning. Teaching is, even for those who love it, at times isolating. It happens behind closed doors, one adult navigating the needs and complexities of twenty or more children, twenty or more entirely different personalities. We are not, in truth, so far removed from the days of the one-room schoolhouse. As much as teachers may talk to other faculty members, they don't go out to lunch or briefly laze by coffeepots or watercoolers. Elementary school teachers must calculate when their classrooms are subdued enough for them even to escape to the bathroom. But I never found it boring, and as I got my bearings, it became deeply rewarding.

My education degree had not prepared me, I quickly learned, to teach reading. Like many new teachers, I followed the textbook teacher guide provided by the school system. But that did little to make words and stories come alive. It was when I began a story hour after lunch that my passion quickly became the children's. We read books like
Where the Wild Things Are,
and the children would pretend that the characters had come alive in the classroom. We saved a space in the corner for a web for Charlotte, the famous spider in
Charlotte's Web
. Wilbur's pen was a nearby locker. Bunnies lived in supply closets; monsters screeched on the blackboard. Every book came to life, and the children would gaze eager and wide-eyed, leaning forward as I turned each page. I had them write poems and created books of their poetry, each bound between two cardboard sheets and secured by a ribbon threaded through hand-punched holes. I would save up the funny things they said and call home to regale Mother and Daddy, who laughed at the other end of the phone.

Four decades later, the antics of my students would become the inspiration for my first book, a children's story,
Read All About It!,
which I penned with my daughter Jenna. Like me, Jenna would begin her career as a teacher in inner-city schools, hers in Washington and Baltimore. In
Read All About It!,
as in my first classroom in Longfellow, cherished storybook characters magically came to life.

By the end of that year, though, I was ready to leave Dallas. I had lived there for five years; most of my close college friends were now drifting off to other cities. And I had never lived outside of Texas. I was twenty-two and restless. My students were moving on to the next grade, and it seemed time for me to move as well. One of my roommates, Bobbie Jo, wanted to head east, to Boston, which to our imaginations seemed a world removed from the Texas and Kansas plains. She planned on getting a job at Filene's department store; I would just get a job. We hopped in my car and started across the country, stopping in Nashville and other spots to visit college friends. When we arrived in Boston, neither of us knew one single person to call or where to look for an apartment. After three days, we left, this time driving south to Washington, D.C.

In the nation's capital, we rented a cheap room at the YWCA and washed our clothes in the sink and hung them on lamps and curtain rods to dry. Bobbie Jo applied for a position at Garfinckel's department store. I went to Capitol Hill and interviewed with my local congressman. George Mahon had represented Midland since 1935. He was a lawyer from Lubbock who had been born in northern Louisiana. In 1969, he was almost seventy years old. I called his office and got an appointment.

One late July morning, I walked through the marble-halled warren of congressional offices, where earnest young men and women labored behind piles of paper on their desks. I sat down in a leather chair in Congressman Mahon's office, wearing my nice dress, my purse perched on my lap, as he looked over my resume and asked me if I could type or take shorthand. I could barely type; I had taken a quick course during summer school but hadn't paid much attention. I didn't think that I needed to type because, in a burst of intellectual snobbery and a bit of feminism, I had decided that I wasn't going to be anyone's secretary, and I wasn't going to waste my high school class time on typing lessons. Congressman Mahon then asked me if my father would consider sending me to secretarial school to learn how to type professionally and take shorthand. I thought about what my father had already spent to send me to SMU and said no again. And Congressman Mahon gently suggested that, without being able to do either, I really wasn't qualified for a position in his office. Had I been a typist, however, in the summer of 1969, I might very well have become a congressional staffer in Washington.

Bobbie Jo decided to remain in Washington. Her boyfriend, Chuck, was in Vietnam, and she couldn't bear to spend the year in Texas, seeing her friends arm in arm, hand in hand. She wanted to, as she put it, "go into exile." I left her to board in a rooming house, with her job at Garfinckel's, and drove back to Texas, alone, driving for hours during the day and sleeping each night in neon-lit motels that dotted the highway. My SMU friend Janet Kinard had moved from Dallas to Houston. All summer, she had been calling and saying that she needed a roommate. I repacked and set off for Houston. When I got on the Katy Freeway bound for downtown, traffic came to a halt. A wrecked truck was blocking the freeway. People rolled down their windows and got out of their cars to sit on the roofs and the hoods because it was August and it was hot, that hot, humid air from the bayous and the Gulf of Mexico that hangs over Houston the way it does over the Mississippi Delta to the east. I sat on the roof of my car listening to people mill around and talk until the authorities had cleared the accident and we could move again. I hoped it wasn't some sort of an omen that, as I drove into Houston to begin the rest of my life, I got stuck on a freeway and waited for hours in the August sun.

Dallas was a newer city. As late as 1860, it had a mere 678 people. By that same year, Houston had briefly been the capital of Texas and was already sporting the beginnings of a port and a rail system, with more than four hundred miles of track laid in the surrounding ground. But over a century later, in 1969, Houston seemed younger and brasher. The city's buildings were a hodgepodge across the skyline. There were no zoning regulations, so it was possible to have a gleaming skyscraper on the lot next to a funny old house that had stood in that same spot for decades. I moved in with Janet and joined the ranks of young, professional women by getting a job at a brokerage house.

Prior to that job, my closest brush with high finance had been when I was around fifteen. One Saturday morning, Daddy put on his nicest suit and tie, Mother wore her best dress, I spent hours with spray and hard rollers to get my hair to billow up over my head, and we drove downtown to a photography studio for a formal family portrait. After he saw the pictures, Daddy smiled his big, broad grin and said, "I think I look like a Philadelphia banker." His idea of a Philadelphia banker came from the old black-and-white Katharine Hepburn movie
The Philadelphia Story,
but for someone from Lubbock, Texas, it was the look of success.

I, however, was not cut out to be a banker. I was dreadfully bored at the brokerage house and longed to return to the classroom. Within a couple of months, I was teaching again, taking over the class of a teacher who had left to have a baby. My school was the John F. Kennedy Elementary School; my class was the fourth grade, and our principal was Mrs. Gunnells.

At first, I hated it. I was starting in the middle of the school year, the classroom was in chaos, and after my sweet class in Dallas, I was unprepared for this group of nine-year-olds. My students were wild, screaming, talking back, hiding erasers, wadding up pieces of paper and lobbing them across the room. They were determined to see just how far they could push a new teacher. Every weekend, I would get the "Sunday sads"; I dreaded returning to my classroom on Monday morning. When I passed construction workers with their hard hats and lunch pails, I envied them. They did not have raucous children to deal with, particularly two rambunctious brothers, whom I thought of as the "dynamic duo." The older brother was in my class; his younger brother was a first grader. Whenever the first grader grew bored, he would sneak into my classroom, jump out from behind the desk, and scream, "Boo." All the children would laugh, and whatever tenuous control I had asserted to get them to pay attention would vanish all over again. Gradually I started to read the signs of restlessness and learned to spot the little brother before he reached the door. I would send one or both brothers on an errand to deliver a note or sharpen pencils, giving them a chance to get up and move around.

The Kennedy School sat on a busy commercial road; trucks, cars, and buses rattled outside the windows. The students, nearly all of whom were African-American, lived for the most part in small, run-down houses behind the school building on narrow side streets, which eventually dead-ended alongside warehouses and the train tracks. The houses were tiny and old; they had clapboard siding with peeling paint and loose asbestos shingles on the roofs. Parked in front were rusting cars, whose tire treads dug into the yards. Most of the parents worked, but there were few opportunities available to them. Poverty, lack of education, even alcohol abuse lurked behind too many doors.

It was only the mothers who came to school; the dads never did. Most of our students qualified for free lunch and a breakfast, if they got there early enough. For a few, these were often the only regular meals they had. They would arrive in the morning, bellies rumbling, and pile their plates with food. After lunch had passed, they endured the slow burn of hunger until the next day. I can't imagine how they navigated the holidays and weekends. One of my students was so hungry that he could not stay awake; he spent part of the day with his head resting on his desk. He was a talented artist, able to draw lovely and elaborate pictures. Once, his mother came to a meeting at school, and I gingerly mentioned that her son spent a lot of time sleeping at his desk. She told me very matter-of-factly that she left quite early in the morning, and the kids "just had to make it on their own." It was not her choice; there was just no alternative. I don't remember that she ever came back to school after that. We were used to partly empty back-to-school nights and the ghosts of parents who failed to sign the notes we dutifully sent home with their children. But in the early 1970s, teachers were not expected to reach into families' lives. We could only try to teach our students before they moved on. Corporal punishment was still in use in the Texas school system; I had seen it at Longfellow. I could have spanked a hungry child or smacked his knuckles with a ruler, and the school would have been obligated to take my side.

There were some students we did help. At Longfellow, I had a petite girl who was constantly jumping up and down and trying to attract attention. Then we did the eye chart and found that she was just like me: partially blind. She was the way I would have been if I hadn't had glasses. I moved her to the front row, and the school nurse sent a note home saying that she needed glasses. Her mother refused to get them, but the nurse did not give up. Eventually, the child got glasses. And John F. Kennedy Elementary, despite the pressures of the neighborhood, was a well-run school. The faculty, white and African-American, was dedicated; many had taught for years. But too often at other city schools, teachers were put in rooms with twenty or more students and simply told "good luck." I've always been struck by how teachers were the last professionals to get phones on their desks, and how hard it has been for them to stay in contact with parents. Today, of course, they have e-mail and cell phones, but for years, parents and teachers in huge urban school districts coexisted in a perpetual state of mutual isolation.

Not all contact was good, however. Once a student's mother stormed into my classroom and yelled at me over something she thought had happened to her son. The entire class watched with their mouths hanging open. I was stunned, but Mrs. Gunnells, the principal, quickly came to my defense--she was very strict with the parents too. From the wild fourth grade, I moved to the second grade and had the younger brother of my dynamic duo, the little boy who had so loved sneaking in my classroom door. I stayed with that class for third grade, which meant more story time after lunch, but it also meant that every subject I was weak in, like math, my students were weak in too. They became very dependent on one adult, me. For much of their fourth-grade year, they told their new teacher, "We don't have to do that, because Miss Welch didn't say that we had to."