Fifty Such Stories

Almost forgotten on the top shelf of my closet is an album filled with photos of kids. I owe these kids. They showed me how much I needed to know.

I met them fresh out of their traumas—before foster care, before court hearings, and before treatment. And though my husband and I lived with them as their houseparents at a group home, they’ve mostly disappeared from our lives.

I drag a chair to the closet and stand on tiptoe to reach for the album. And I turn the yellowed pages, poring over photos of kids frozen in the crises of their childhoods.

Page after page, I lament—if only I had known then what I know now.

Shawn, whose father tried to strangle him. Amy, whose mother died. Eric, who had been rejected by his birth parents and two sets of adoptive parents. Kelly, who was caught in a fierce custody battle. Nicole, who had run away, making it to Ohio from Montana before she was caught. Melissa, who had been found in a sting operation when her mom sold her “services” to a trucker.

Nearly fifty such stories.

So much I hadn’t understood back then. So many tools I didn’t have—Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Gardner’s ways of learning, Dabrowski’s intensities, Erikson’s stages of development, Piaget’s cognitive development, Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory, Horkheimer’s critical theory, Bloom’s domains and taxonomies. And more. Much more.

What I did have was love. But a painful reality is that being loved is not the same as being understood. And love without understanding often bewilders and even wounds. My failures to understand filled the group-home kids with angst. And me with questions.

The very best teachers arouse curiosity so students ask questions.

Shawn did this for me. And Nicole. And Eric. And the rest.

After I left the group home, I took my questions to college and graduate school. My search for answers lit up every teacher-training class I took, shaping my pedagogy and making me a better teacher for the thousands of students I taught later in middle school and prison and college.

If only it hadn’t been at the expense of the group-home kids.

Their fading faces in the yellowing album look out at me with brave smiles and bewildered hurt and ill-concealed hostility.

“Thank you,” I whisper. “And I’m sorry, so sorry!”

My nonagenarian dad has a Pennsylvania Dutch saying. He’s apt to toss it out when someone feels regret: Vee get too soon oldt, but too late schmart.

It’s true, of course.

But I wish it weren’t.