To be completely honest, I decided to become an educator just based on the simple fact that I knew it would be incredibly difficult to make a living off of my artwork. I know it's possible but it's an intense struggle as I've learned from a lot of my college professors. Teaching seemed like a stable profession. You have a steady income, great benefits, you get to work among a group of people but you are still "the boss" in your classroom, you get holidays and summers off and it's a good job to have while you're married with children.
I went through the education classes pretty excited about it. You think art teacher and most of the time you think about elementary art. To be frank, I DESPISED my education classes and the program at UT Martin. I felt like my teachers were lecturing about not lecturing your classes. I learned about too many teaching methods and philosophies that I was never getting a good understanding of the things you have to do to manage a classroom. It was difficult for me to write lesson plans that were "meaningful" to my college professors. So you can only imagine the horror I felt in me when they set me out in the student teaching field. My first placement was at Dyersburg Intermediate and God blessed me beyond measure there. My CT was wonderful, supportive and encouraging. The children were so spontaneous, positive and had this beautiful eagerness to learn. I loved teaching elementary art. I loved the personalities that came with the students. I loved their excitement to learn and to jump into the process of art making. It was hard, however, learning how to discipline. I found myself disciplining more than actually teaching.
When I was transfered to teach at Westview High School, that's a completely different story. I never knew what I was doing. My CT was old, about to retire and burned out on the students. High school was NOT my ideal place to teach. The students were disrespectful, unmotivated and lazy. They didn't care about what I had to teach them and they didn't care to do their best with my projects. When I showed them an act of discipline they brushed it off like it was nothing. It was incredibly frustrating. After I graduated I told myself I will NEVER teach high school. I did not have a good experience at all. But I was still grateful with the Lord-- it showed me at the time that I believed I was more suited for the little ones.
Job searching was very discouraging after I graduated from college. I put in applications literally in fifteen different counties. Nobody seemed interested. You have to know that at this point I avoided applying for ANY high school position. After months of unreturned emails and phone calls, I decided to get on with the year in hopes of teaching the next school year. Until a colleague of mine called me one Wednesday and told me her old high school was in dying need of an art teacher. At this point, I just needed a job. They interviewed me on Thursday, school started the following Monday and I had moved into a new apartment close by on the next Friday.
That first month of teaching was difficult. It started off good and then the students were showing their true colors. Most of them were well behaved, but I was dealing with laziness and unmotivated students who just didn't care about doing any work whatsoever. It dawned on me that it was time to get the "teacher attitude." I became hateful and strict with them. I cared more about seeing their progression than being nice. For a while it started to work. They did their work, but they lost their love of the class. They dreaded coming to class, when before they loved coming to art class. At that time, it didn't matter to me as long as they were being kept busy.
And then one Tuesday morning, I will never forget it. I came into school one morning, taught my first block and then second block came around. Second block is my planning period and the first thing I do usually is go buy a glass of sweet tea from the cafeteria. I walked on over to the cafeteria and I saw my principal, vice principal, superintendent and other administrators sitting against the doors of the cafeteria with their heads down and their arms folded. Something wasn't right. I quietly peeked into the windows of the cafeteria and saw about 40 students sobbing at the tables and Mr. Vespie, our guidance counselor, was talking to them as they wept.
My principal leaned over to me and whispered "One of our juniors, Jerremy killed himself last night. Mr. Vespie's telling all the students today and we're going to let them come into the cafeteria to be with each other."
Jerremy. He was one of my students. He was in my third block class and sat on the left side of the room. He was a happy student who was friends with everybody in the school. Never in my life would I have thought he would have been capable to commit suicide. After that, I didn't even have time to react to the situation. Everything after that seemed to happen in fast motion. Mr. Vespie went from class to class and broke the news to the students and we all gathered into the cafeteria.
It was the most pitiful, heart breaking, devastating thing I've ever witnessed. I sat back and watched my students, these 14-18 year olds that I've seen every day for 8 hours for the last couple of months cry their eyes and hearts out. I watched the tall and heavy football players break down onto the ground in tears. I walked around the cafeteria to comfort my students as I was fighting back my own tears. One of my students, Leah saw me and walked up to me and collapsed in my arms. She gripped my shirt as if her life depended on it and she buried her tears and face into my shoulders as she cried "He was such a good person. Why would he do this to me?! Why did he have to go?!" I've never had someone hold onto me that hard. My principal then gave me the assignment to go tend to the girls who were in the bathroom throwing up. For three hours, I held back the hairs of the high school girls as they were purging. They were crying so hard and were so hurt, it physically made them sick. The entire school day was like this. It went on until every student checked out early. Before we all went back to sit in class, I walked back to my classroom, locked myself in my supplies closet and cried my eyes out.
I have never seen hurt in human beings like I saw that morning. Personally knowing Jerremy, it even hurt me. I couldn't understand why he would have found it necessary to take something as precious as his life away from him. He had great potential. He was smart, funny, outgoing, loving.
My school was never the same after that. It took the students about a month and a half to get back on the track they were at. I went home that awful day and laid in my bed and prayed. I must have prayed for hours. My heart was broken for Jerremy, his family, his friends, all of my students. Seeing them hurt was like seeing my own children hurt. It was then I decided, putting my curriculum and education standards to the side, that my number one priority as a teacher was to make sure my students knew that they were loved and cared about. My teaching was never the same- I was not only teaching them art, I was loving them. I was looking out for them, encouraging them to live up to the high and wonderful potential I know is in all of them. I was teaching them compassion.
The Bible says in 1 Peter 3:8 "Finally, be ye all of one mind, having compassion one of another, love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous."
Whatever it is you do in your life, whatever comes towards you, always have compassion for your life and the people in it. Don't let anything take it away from you. Always show it, every moment in your life. You never know how many people you are blessing.
