Author: Phyllis Swartz

Some of the best teachers I’ve known had tough first years.

Take a fresh-from-college guy we’ll call George. I helped to interview George, and I could tell he cared, genuinely cared about students. He meant all the right things he said in the interview—that he once had a teacher who changed the direction of his life and that he wanted to make this sort of difference for students he taught. He was a hard worker, he told us, wouldn’t mind staying up late to critique student writing. And he believed in taking one for the team of teachers he hoped to join.

So we recommended George. But for much of the year he wished we hadn’t.

The workload overwhelmed him. He couldn’t keep up with the ever-growing stacks of papers to be graded. He came to school on Monday mornings, exhausted by late Sunday-night lesson planning, and for every office form he completed, two more appeared.

Still, he might have been able to handle the work if he could have managed the kids. George made the classic first-year teacher mistake. Determined not to be a teacher with a brittle voice and snapping eyes, he came bearing gifts. And when constant chatter and paper wads and general unruliness turned him from a Santa Claus to a Scrooge, students revolted.

But five years later, George was still teaching. In fact, the principal was sending new teachers to his classroom to see how it’s done. And when those newbies watched George teach, they saw not only what worked. They also saw what George had learned from what hadn’t work. In education we call this reflective practice.

The longer I taught and watched others teach, the more I came to believe that the main difference between good teachers and bad teachers is that good teachers know when they’re bad. Then they do something about it.

After I put my small garden to bed last fall, I needed something for my hands. Something not related to a keyboard. So I picked up a tool that’s new to me—a needle.

After casting about for a project, I found one—an embroidered autobiography. I bought a roll of twill tape and divided it into 12-inch sections, a foot for each year of my life. And all winter, this project was my reward at the end of a day of writing and caring for parents. While I listened to documentaries and books-on-tape and book reviews, I embroidered images of my life—three per year.

If you picked up this embroidered timeline, you’d find the cabin where I was conceived and Herman, the duck, who was once my dear friend but who became my enemy and so ended as dinner on my grandma’s table.

You’d see Rover, the dog, who was so patient with children that he stood meekly as my brother used my grandma’s butcher knife on his neck. You’d find the shaped notes I heard in church and the Casselman Bridge over the river where I played.

In my school years, you’d see symbols of the Duck-and-Cover drills during the Cold War and the metamorphosis of a monarch butterfly that emerged in my first-grade classroom. You’d notice the year we moved to Flint, Michigan, where I encountered the civil rights movement and the wonders of bookmobiles and of ice cream carts jangling down our street.

For me, the images of childhood came easy. Now, I’m moving on to the teenage years, when life becomes more abstract, more idea driven. But I’m finding images—symbols of New Math, a paddle to show corporal punishment in schools at that time, fires of the long, hot summer of 1967, and the cover of the Martyrs Mirror, for the year I couldn’t stop turning its pages.

And what will happen when I get to midlife on my timeline? Will the images keep coming? I hope so.

In the meantime, I’m stitching the moments that mattered most, marking my existence on cloth, seeing the patterns of my places in the world, and being soothed by color and fabric and the sliding in and out of a needle.

The book in my mom’s hands means something. I can tell by the way she holds it in two hands, as if she’s offering me a gift.

“We were waiting for you to be born,” she says, “when we bought this.”

I expect something like Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, which, at the time I was born was the second-best selling book next to the Bible.

I do not expect the title she shows me—Self-Taught Basic Algebra.

“Your dad and I both wanted to learn algebra,” she says. “So we bought this book. After supper we’d work the problems. Sometimes we didn’t stop until midnight.”

I imagine them hunched over the kitchen table, each with their pencil and paper, playing with letters and numbers and symbols, trying to find answers. They had no social media, no television, no radio. They didn’t spend an evening on the town, eating out and watching a movie.

But together they learned how to combine like terms and how to isolate all the unknowns on one side of an equation. They read about two trains leaving a town at the same time and traveling in opposite directions at the rates of 40 and 50 miles per hour. And they figured out how many hours it would take until the trains were exactly 270 miles apart.

Having this much fun until midnight must have cost them during the next early-morning milking. But apparently it was worth it.

“Sometimes before going to bed, we’d get to laughing,” my mom says. “Laughing hard.”

Her eyes take on a dreamy look. And she chuckles again, remembering.

“We never did figure out,” she says, “why algebra did that to us.”

In education, we call this interbrain synchrony. It happens when people cooperate to solve a problem. When two people’s neurons fire together for an evening of puzzling, they find each other on the same wavelength, and it feels mighty good.

I ask to borrow Self Taught Basic Algebra. I want to leaf through its pages and imagine how my parents spent those evenings together as they waited for me to be born.

“Make sure you bring this back,” my mom says, when she hands it to me.

And I will. Maybe they’ll want to review some algebra.

Big eyes stare at me from the attic trunk. For more than sixty years now, ever since I painted them in first grade, these eyes have watched from behind their glasses. The eyes belong to Alvina, my first teacher. And I painted them in her classroom at Yoder School.

In my portrait, Alvina is a force—all-seeing eyes, a mouth at the ready, and capable arms. Her eyes don’t miss a daydreaming student or the slump of shoulders when work is too hard. Her mouth can tell a line-cutting kid a thing or two. But it also makes stories live when she reads aloud, stories from books and stories we write. Her arms build a grocery store for us in the corner of the classroom and lift newly-hatched monarchs into the sky so they can find freedom.

At age seven, do I already have a growing inkling that Alvina will become the polestar me? For decades, she guided me as I explored new ideas and methods for teaching.

What would Alvina do? I asked this question hundreds of times as I taught middle schoolers and inmates and gifted students. The answers to this question often helped me assess, problem-solve, design and modify my practice.

I smooth the faded painting on its now brittle, yellowed easel paper. My first-grade portrait of Alvina takes up the whole page, much like she filled my teaching life. But I’m retired now, and Alvina has died. In some ways, it’s over—the story of Alvina and how she taught me to teach.

But as I close the attic trunk, I have a thought. When Alvina retired, her story lived on in the next generation of teachers. And those teachers have tried pass it on to their students. It’s a strong story, strong enough to last another generation.

***

Read more about Alvina in my book Yoder School.

You wouldn’t think parenting toddlers could help me teach. Especially not in prison, middle school, and college classrooms. But in all these settings, a skill I learned during those melting-down, picking-eating, potty-training years helped. And that is, to stay a step ahead.

When my toddlers were hungry, I learned to have dinner already cooking; when they were tired, to be near a bed for a nap; when they were thirsty, a drink already in hand.

If I could bestow one gift to each young teacher, I know exactly what I’d give—foresight, the ability to see what will be needed. But unfortunately, foresight can’t be given. You get it by using the double lenses of the past and the present to imagine what the future could hold.

So how to develop foresight?

Pay attention to the present—Hmm . . . this looks familiar, you might think when a student hides behind a hoodie in stony silence with clenched fists.

Remember the past—The last time this happened, class ended with a fight.

Think proactively about the future—How can I influence what happens next? What is needed to help this student move in a good direction? How can I prevent a spark from turning into the fire it could eventually become? How can I manage misbehavior before it begins?

It’s the nature of the classroom, that someone is a step ahead, making things happen. And if the teacher is only reactive, taking things as they come, students will be glad to step to the front.

Teaching with foresight prevents problems, increases learning, and helps people like each other and themselves.

In some ways, students (and teachers, too) are just toddlers grown taller. We might have learned to whisper instead of yell, to hide feelings behind veils of varying thicknesses, and to get what we want in quieter ways. But like toddlers, we do better when we’re fed and well-rested, and when someone appreciates who we are and has the foresight to help us be good.

Left to my own devices, I’d have left our small town at totality’s edge and headed to the center of it all. There, I’d have enjoyed seeing a new place, crowding with people from all walks of life, and traveling home in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Instead, I spent the afternoon in my own backyard on a deck with my husband and nonagenarian parents.

We were four of the millions who spent that rare afternoon looking to the sky. As the moon hid the sun, we heard the birds fall silent and felt the temperature drop. And for 47 seconds the sky darkened, and we saw Venus shining in the sky.

Solar eclipses themselves aren’t all that rare. What’s rare is an eclipse in your own backyard. On average, any particular spot on Earth is in the path of totality only once every 360 years. The last time for our backyard was in 1806. And the next time will be 2099.

My parents won’t be here the next time the shadow of the moon sweeps across our patch of earth. And neither will I.

Just last week, my parents celebrated their 70^th wedding anniversary. Anniversaries themselves aren’t rare. But only one in a thousand couples reach the platinum year.

Sitting on my quiet and darkening deck with three people I love, I began to think about this double rareness. What are the odds, I wondered, of a total solar eclipse and two parents, ages 91 and 95, all showing up at the same time in your own backyard?

No wonder the afternoon felt extraordinary.

You never know what a kid might be thinking.

During Sunday school, for example, I kept trying to figure out why I was a weak butt. It was from a song we sang almost every class: Jesus loves me, this I know . . . Little ones to him belong. They are weak butt. He is strong.

I didn’t want to say the word butt out loud. So I didn’t ask. I just kept wondering.

When my great-grandpa died, I found another puzzlement. It was a momentous and solemn time. Great-grandpa was the bishop, and over 700 people attended his funeral. Many of us were his family. From his nine children came 62 grandchildren and 116 great-grandchildren, with more being born each month.

I was young and little and one of the many who called him Grandpa. Still, I had my own particular memories. Once I sat with him in church. Never before had I listened to a sermon in the Amen Corner. There, people with grey hair and gnarled hands and hunched-over backs sat perfectly still. No one colored pictures or ate pretzels or played with little black and white magnetic dogs that chased each other across the hymnal. The only thing I could find to do during that whole church service was fiddle with the ends of Great-Grandpa’s long beard. It was as white as snow and as springy as a rubber band. When I pulled down, it jumped back into place. Great-Grandpa, his eyes twinkling down, showed me he didn’t mind.

The evening before the funeral, I stood in a long line, waiting to see him in his casket. Beside the casket a lamp shone. I had never seen such a lamp. Its glass shade was shaped like a bowl. And it looked like someone had sprinkled snips of hair inside it.

Why?

I couldn’t ask my mom. In that whole room, no one even whispered. So while we shuffled along in line, waiting our turn, I figured it out. This must be a funeral lamp. And to honor Great-Grandpa, they decorated it with hair from his beard. It felt good, clearing up something so puzzling.

The next day during the funeral, I sat sad, knowing I’d never see Great-Grandpa’s beard again. But under the sadness was also a certain smugness, guessing that many of my cousins still didn’t understand about funeral lamps.

Life is like this, I thought, trying not to wiggle on the bench during the long funeral, full of things you’ve got to figure out.

I got what I deserved—the chickenpox.

“Stay in your own yard,” my mom told me. “The kids next door have been exposed.”

Usually, there weren’t kids next door. But for this one glorious week, the house was full of kids visiting their aunts. And some were my age.

“You hear me?” my mom said. “We have a new baby at our house, and we don’t need the chickenpox.”

I wandered outside where the yard seemed big and empty and suddenly dull.

Across the lane, the porch door opened and kids spilled out.

“We can’t come over,” they hollered.

So I watched them play tag. I moved closer to see the camp they built under the maple tree and still closer to hear Simon Says. They drifted my way and asked about the new baby. And soon we sat at the edges of our yards, separated only by a narrow lane. Pushing the gravel with sticks, we spent the rest of the morning designing a town.

This is where my mom found me.

“I didn’t leave the yard,” I told her.

“But you didn’t think,” she said, “about why it was important for you to stay in the yard.”

In bed, I had plenty of time to think.

A fever rose and from my scalp to the bottoms of my feet, small spots appeared and turned into blisters, which turned into scabs. New bumps kept coming, some in my ears, some in my mouth. I ached and itched and dreamed bad dreams. Food lost its taste, and calamine lotion stuck to my pajamas.

I got the chickenpox hard, hard enough to learn myself a lesson—that following the rules and doing the right thing aren’t always the same.

When one obeys only the letter of the law, one can often find loopholes and exceptions that allow technical obedience to the law and at the same time violation of the spirit of the law.

A book landed on my porch last week, one I didn’t know existed. And one with a surprising topic, at least for Theodor Seuss Geisel.  

For years, I’ve collected Seuss books, starting with the Bright-and-Early board books

Left foot, right foot, I read to my preschoolers. Wet foot, dry foot . . . high foot, low foot.

They couldn’t get enough of the pure nonsense, wanting me to read again and again. They didn’t know that they were learning rhythm and rhyme and repetition, all precursors to reading.  

My kids moved on to I-Can-Read books, feeling smart as they deciphered Green Eggs and Ham. Using only 50 different words—all one-syllable, except one—they followed the exploits of a man who steadfastly refuses to eat the green eggs and ham. 

I would not like them here or there, I would not like them anywhere, my kids read with deep feeling, thinking, perhaps of the zucchini we had for dinner. They didn’t know that Dr. Seuss had a lesson in store. When the man finally tries green eggs and ham, he says, I like green eggs and ham! I do! I like them, Sam-I-am!

As a teacher, I used Dr. Seuss’s issue books to illuminate concepts. The Sneetches shares themes with The Outsiders. The Butter Battle Book introduces the Cold War, The Lorax works well alongside Thoreau’s Walden, and Yertle, the Turtle helps students understand the Nazi regime. And I even took Seuss’s Hooray for Diffendoofer Day! to college, using it to introduce educational ideologies.

I was no longer teaching in 2021 when Dr. Seuss Enterprises released a statement saying it would discontinue six Dr. Seuss books. These books, the enterprise said, “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

Though I was no longer teaching, a lesson formed in my head—a lesson about how easily we are shaped by the sensibilities around us, how naturally we orient toward centering our own people and decentering others. If I were teaching, my students and I would discuss hurtful stereotypes in the shelved Seuss books. And we’d read Horton Hears a Who, the book about an elephant named Horton, who believes that everyone should be treated equally. And we’d ask, how can this happen? The good and the bad all mixed up together in one author?

But I’m no longer teaching. These days I sit with my nonagenarian parents in doctors’ offices and hospital rooms.

And Dr. Seuss has a book for this too—You’re Only Old Once, the book that landed on my porch last week and a book he wrote when he was flattened with cancer treatments.

He describes the waiting room:

There you’ll sit several hours, 
growing tenser each second, 
fearing your fate will be worse than you reckoned. 

And the hospital tour: For your Pill Drill, you’ll go to Room Six Sixty-three . . .

And the check out:

When at least we are sure you’ve been properly pilled, 
then a few paper forms must be properly filled 
so that you and your heirs may be properly billed. 

Dr. Seuss’s humor and whimsy is a secret sauce that helped Baby Boomers learn to read and to explore hard realities in safe places—nonsensical, pretend worlds. In his book about growing old, a book for obsolete children, as its cover says, he does this again, using humor to show what’s coming for Baby Boomers, in a way that they can (maybe) laugh about it.

And this is why Seuss books, from The Foot Book to You’re Only Old Once, line my bookshelf.