This holiday season, as many teachers hopefully find rest and relaxation halfway through a school year, it is as important a time as ever to discuss burnout amid the chaos of Oklahoma’s education news.
To that end, here is my personal Christmas story — a time when I questioned whether to leave the profession, only to have the students of John Marshall High School provide the inspiration to keep me in the classroom. All names referenced are pseudonyms.
Finding lessons in tragedy
Just before the October fall break in 2004, we had time to feel introspective. Most seniors were on a (poorly planned) field trip, and it was a great moment to reflect on our first quarter. My students joined in celebrating our classes’ great year so far, while we also shared our worries about the school’s future. My plan was to leave for a holiday in the mountains immediately after school dismissed.
Then we heard about a car wreck involving two students from John Marshall. We were told Tim might not survive, and I visited him in intensive care. He was unconscious, so my attention turned to his grandmother, his deeply devoted guardian. She sat day and night at her grandson’s bedside, and I joined her there instead of journeying to the mountains. Had it not been for that change in plans, I would have been unreachable in the wilderness when my father suffered a heart attack.
In the aftermath of near-fatal crises with a student and my father, my classes discussed the situations and pulled together even more tightly. In every class, many students said they had never known their fathers, while others described their alienation from their dads. As those students comforted me, they closely monitored the way father-son relationships played out in intact families. In return, I admitted that many of my stories were not literally true. I acknowledged that I had not killed the bear that was on display in the school’s hallway. I had not reached down its throat, grabbed its tail, and pulled it inside out, so that the bear tickled itself to death. It was my father who had done so — or had claimed to have done so. Seriously, I explained, the opportunity to pass down tall tales from my dad was one of the great rewards of teaching.
It became harder to tell one of my true stories. As a kid in the 1950s, I first had been exposed to segregation when our family went to a cafeteria that was being picketed. The owner said white people were welcome in the fancier dining room, and we would not have to pay their premium prices. We kids were happy to eat in the rich dining room, but we also asked some difficult questions. Our parents were noticeably uncomfortable when explaining segregation to us. The owner came back, this time saying that we shouldn’t have to eat among people he described with a racial slur.
“Why did he say that word?” we asked, “Why shouldn’t we…?”
My dad had been a boxer with a temper, and he shouted, “There’s not a damned reason.”
It took every policeman on the line to pull my father off of the racist businessman.
Inspired by powerful narratives
My father died at the end of the Christmas holiday, and I returned to school a week later. My scheduled lesson was sitting on my desk, but I had given it no thought. I was on duty that Monday morning, accepting condolences, when a starving pit bull walked in the door and begged for help. Obviously, the dog was beyond saving, so I coaxed it into my classroom while we waited for animal control. My first-hour class was moved to another room. I grabbed some of my prepared lesson and started to teach.
Ordinarily, it was a multimedia lesson. I would hand out transcripts of National Public Radio’s famous Christmas Story, and then I would play an audiotape of John Henry Faulk reading his account of white and Black sharecroppers sharing a Christmas dinner.  This lesson had always proven to be a great success, but the story reminded me of my father, so I knew I had to make a quick decision about whether I could handle the emotion.
I only had one copy of the transcript with me, and I did not know if I was up to reading such a powerful narrative. I did fine through the first page, which described the white sharecroppers’ kids who had been warned to not get their hopes up if the promised dinner did not happen. By the second page, when the Black sharecropper assumed that his family would be excluded, I started to cry. Matt, a white student on an Individualized Education Program, read the rest of the story about the families sharing “the most wonderful Christmas ever.”
Eventually, my most unsettling discussion of the year involved Matt, who had been one of our success stories. However, a close member of Matt’s family would not stop pressuring me to admit my student would have no future after graduation.
At that time, I was being encouraged to apply for a union job in Colorado. I had been planning to visit Denver — and perhaps commit to a new career — when my little buddy, Matt, died. At his funeral, I saw a family member in the front row walk out of the ceremony.
I knew then I could not walk out on my kids.
