Author: Phyllis Swartz

If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t believe it—Jason was sitting in his seat, eyes moving between the classroom screen and his note-taking paper, when he seemed to lose track of where he was in space. And thud! He fell to the floor.

For the third time that class period, I guided the class back to the lesson. And to draw myself back into good humor, I muttered a mantra, the one I used when I encountered clumsy teens: Remember the chocolate milk.

I repeated this mantra when a kid caught a foot on a cord, elbowed a computer off a desk, or tipped too far back in a chair. I used when kids bumped into each other and tripped over their own feet and walked into walls. This mantra reminded me of my own adolescent mishap with Great-Uncle Evan.

Everyone liked Uncle Evan. So did I. But I was also in awe of him. He had an office full of books and wrote poetry and spoke with precision and walked like a king.

So, when he beckoned to me during an afternoon picnic, I took a deep breath and walked toward him with all the poise I could gather. The trouble was that I was balancing a tray with a plate of food and a too-full tumbler of chocolate milk. Even so, I made it across the uneven yard without a spill.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and Uncle Evan was still wearing his starched white shirt and suspenders.

“Tell me, Phyllis,” he said. “What have you been reading?”

Opening my mouth must have shifted my center of gravity. The tumbler went sliding across the tray, toppled over the rim, and drenched Uncle Evan. The milk ran through his hair and over his glasses and down his face, soaking his starched white shirt.

Uncle Evan stood and shook like a wet dog. He blew on his glasses and wiped them with a napkin. He dumped the milk from his metal chair. Then he pulled up two clean chairs.

“It’ll all dry,” he said. “Now sit down and tell me what you’ve been reading.”

Not until much later did I learn the word proprioception. This word describes what growing teens often lack—the awareness of one’s body and body parts in relation to the environment.

And no wonder. They’re in the time of biggest growth since infancy, sometimes gaining as much as a half inch a day. And growth is uneven. During growth spurts, some parts of their bodies get ahead of other parts. Bones, for example, grow faster than the muscles that control them.

No wonder they don’t know how their bodies fit into the spaces around them.

Middle school rooms are full of off-kilter kids. And my chocolate-milk memory reminds me that I was once one of them.

The Flint Journal saved my Saturdays.

For most of my childhood, I woke up wishing Saturdays had never been invented. Saturday was cleaning day. And cooking day. And shoe-polishing day.

Mostly, my mom cooked. And it was my job to clean—to clear clutter, dust furniture, swab out toilets, scour sinks, vacuum carpets, wash floors, and to shine shoes for Sunday.

And all this with six little brothers and sisters underfoot. The older ones helped, except they kept drifting off, and it was my job to pull them back to their work. They’d dust the dresser but not the bedside stand. They’d smear shoe polish on a newly waxed floor. And they’d gag when they swabbed out the toilet, so I’d do it instead. Sometimes I wondered if they were worth it.

Much later I realized that Saturdays gave me grit, stretching my ability to persist, to meet a goal. But at the time, Saturdays were the bane of my childhood.

Except for the Flint Journal.

Every Saturday afternoon at 4:00, I practically grabbed the Flint Journal out of the hands of the paperboy. I’d flip to the third section to find the Wide Awake Club. Each week Aunt Judy, the leader of the club, posted a new topic: heroes, the perfect goof-off day, pets, my wish for the world. Flint kids competed for prizes with stories or poems or India-ink drawings.

I never entered an India-ink drawing, but each week I wrote a poem or a story. All week I’d wait for Saturday edition of the paper.  If I won first prize, my dad would drive me downtown to the Flint Journal office. Aunt Judy would come out from behind her desk, shake my hand, and say something nice about my writing. From shelves filled with new books, I could choose one. Not much I owned was new, so I was proud of my growing collection, each imprinted with the Wide Awake Club stamp.

The Wide Awake Club got me through the dusting and shoe polishing. But it did more. I learned something important, something I’ve used all my life to keep going when it’s tough—that a carrot at the end makes a difference.

After I taught about a hundred years, people started saying something to me—I bet kids are worse now than when you started teaching.

I knew the right answer was to agree, to bemoan the current state of the world in general and of kids in specific.

But when I started teaching, kids were bad. Worst of all in my first year. They carved nasty words on desks and muttered them and sometimes shouted them out. They shot spit wads and flipped me off and positioned tacks on each other’s seats. And between classes, they flicked half-smoked cigarettes into restroom trashcans to start fires.

What’s strange is that through the decades, kids seemed to get better. I kept finding more good in more kids more of the time.

Take Christopher, for example. He struggled with sleep, every single morning. As a novice teacher, I’d have taken this as a sign of disrespect—that he thought I was boring and that I needed to bring him to task.

But in my last year of teaching, I appreciated his struggle. With a low-functioning mom and a dad who stumbled home from the bar most evenings, he kept his siblings afloat—in clean clothes with filled bellies and at their spelling words. He did all this before he could write his own book report. No wonder he came to class in a grouch. No wonder his temper flared enough to send out a punch now and then. No wonder.

As the decades passed, I rarely met a student I couldn’t teach. Every kid had good in there somewhere. The trick was to find out what it was, and then use it to teach that kid everything else.

It’s more effective—and way more fun—to find the good than to bemoan the bad.

When I was thirteen, I took on the prime minister of Australia. I had forgotten about this early attempt of mine to set things right in the world. But a few weeks ago, my mother gave me a box of my childhood papers. And in that box, I found a copy of a letter. As soon as I saw it, I remembered how mad I had been when I sent it.

They were killing rabbits in Australia. And only because there were too many of them. I had read about this in The Weekly Reader—the way kids got news back in my day. I remember how I had visualized the slaughter of such gentle animals. And how these pictures in my head had kept me awake at night.

But the story was bigger than rabbits. There were also too many kangaroos. And the prime minister was making plans to slaughter them, as well.

Dear Prime Minister, I wrote, This is a letter of complaint from America. I will be blunt and say this right out! I think it is perfectly absurd to kill innocent animals.

Animals should be killed only for food, I explained, and not a bit more than is needed.

I was helpful. I suggested that the prime minister solve his rabbit problem by supplying the whole world with Easter rabbits.

And I was pre-emptive—If you start killing kangaroos like you are killing rabbits, you will receive another letter of this kind.

Perhaps, I thought, this would keep the prime minister up at night—worrying about my next letter.

I softened my tone at the end—Please send me an answer for this letter so that I may obtain your ideas on this matter. Thank you very much for your bother concerning this matter.

Back then, you could save money if you sent a trans-Atlantic letter by surface mail on a ship. But the lives of rabbits, and maybe kangaroos, were on the line. So I wrote my letter on thin, translucent airmail paper. It crinkled as I stuffed it into a blue-tinted envelope marked Par Avion.

I waited a week before I started checking the mailbox for a reply.

But I never heard from the prime minister of Australia.

And then I forgot about him and the rabbits and the kangaroos.

I used to dream of skipping school the day after the Super Bowl. As a teacher, that is. Lots of students skipped.  Having succumbed to the “Super Bowl flu,” they spent the morning in bed. The others showed up, too tired to learn, seeming to sleep with their eyes open.

They forgot their pencils and couldn’t find their homework and needed to be told five times to turn to page 263.

“What did you say?”—this was the most-asked question on post-Super Bowl mornings.

But the mercy of this fog ended at lunch.

Then came the afternoon with its sour grapes and arguments about play-calls and in-your-face celebrations by fans of the winning team. And all this was mediated by teachers in their varied post-party states.

Some schools cancel on Super Bowl Monday. I can see why. It’s not a day to introduce new concepts or facilitate group work or give tests. It’s not a day for a whole lot of learning.

Except for one lesson—toughness.

“I know you don’t feel like doing this,” I’d tell students.

They’d look at me through the blear in their eyes.

“And you know what?” I’d say. “I don’t either.”

That got me a point. So they listened as I taught them an old saying: 80 percent of success in life is just showing up.

We weren’t at our best, my students and I, but we were there . . . building our resilience, finding we could be reliable and trustworthy and committed.

I’m writing this the morning after the Chiefs came back to tie the 49ers and to win the game in overtime. I went to bed later than usual. And slept later than usual. I’m glad to be old and retired, writing in a bathrobe in my lamp-lit living room.

But I applaud all the resilient people toughing it out just down the road at London Middle School.

Twice last week I made my way through airport security. TSA workers have my sympathy. They never know who is coming through their checkpoints. And though they filter through lots of innocents to find a few offenders, they can’t become complacent.

Before my first flight last week, I wove along the queue line ropes, watching an officer at the entry to security. I could see myself in her. Narrowed eyes, attention that snapped toward small sounds, heavy sighs, and clipped answers—all this could have been me, especially at the end of a long middle school day.

Those days wore me down—seven periods of asking kids to put their phones away and explaining that point of view is the writer’s way of deciding who is telling the story to whom and answering the same questions about when the midterm would be and what would be on it and what would happen if they just happened to be absent that day.

On those days, my face would feel as tight as the as the officer at the checkpoint.

With just five people ahead of me, she slammed a passport onto her desk.

“Pour your water out!” she shouted to the line. “All day folks have been trying to smuggle in their last inches of water.”

Her voice turned to a mutter. “I say it and say it.”

And I understood.

I don’t know when I started catching myself—realizing that seventh period deserved my patience as much as the morning classes, that seventh period hadn’t heard the words I said to first period and second and third, the words I had been saying all afternoon.

But I hope I became more like the security officer on my return flight. She was crisp and efficient. But her face was open to me and her smile contagious.

“Trouble with your luggage, ma’am,” she said. “Could you come with me?”

And though I’d heard the word trouble, I didn’t mind following.

“Let’s work this out,” she said, as she zipped open my bag, “and get you on your way.”

It was no problem, only a mirror, one that’s cleared security for over a decade. She handed back my bag.

“There you go,” she said.

And at the end of what must have been a long day, she sent me off with a smile, one that didn’t seem conjured up.

I somehow felt I mattered.

I probably should have done something about it. But forty years later, I’m still glad I didn’t.

During class change at the middle school, I stood at my post outside my classroom door.

At best class change is three minutes of happy, noisy, jostling, when the energy and words quashed by forty-three minutes of class find release.

But class change also crams too many middle schoolers, who haven’t yet learned the rules of the road, into too small a space. Some clog the hall by looking cool as they walked three or four abreast. Others plow through, knocking people over and sending books flying. Still others trip over their own recently-grown feet.

No wonder that, at worst, class change morphs into hot words and flying fists.

On the morning I should have done something but didn’t, I happened to notice an unlikely pair at the far end of the hall—Andy, who towered over me from his nearly six feet and Eric who looked as if he had been plucked from a third-grade classroom.  Andy, the quarterback on his football team, had a temper, but, lucky for Eric, not one easily aroused. This morning Eric pestered Andy all the way down the hall—yanking a book from under his arm, kicking at his feet, elbowing him to get ahead and then blocking his way.

Eric reminded me of a sparrow harassing a hawk. My husband and I like to watch dive-bombing sparrows take on hawks, maybe eight times their size. And we love how the hawks fly steadily on, as if they haven’t noticed anything at all.

Andy seemed to be playing the hawk. But just outside the office door, he reached his limit. Dropping his books, he grabbed Eric under the arms like you’d grab a toddler. Andy lifted Eric up and stuffed him into a nearby trashcan.

It was a good fit. The out-door style can was as high as Eric’s chest. And Eric was stuck. Andy gave him a look, picked up his books, and continued down the hall.

I pulled my door shut. And started class.

“The art of being wise,” said William James, the father of American psychology, “is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

Given the chance, I’d overlook this again. Still, I remember feeling more guilty than wise.

My best basketball-watching buddy is Luke. Side by side on gym bleachers watching his older brothers, my youngest grandson teaches me what I’m sure are the basics.

“You know why the ref blew that whistle, Grandma?” he asks.

“Why, Luke?”

“The player stayed inside the key too long,” he says.

He checks my eyes for understanding, and finding none, he goes on.

“That’s the painted-in part in front of the basket,” he explains.

At the last game I watched with Luke, he told me about flopping.

“It’s when they’re not even hurt,” he said, “but they drop down like they’re dying.”

Several minutes later, a player driving to the basket collided with a stationary defender, who flew backward as if he’d been smashed by a freight train.

“Like that,” Luke said. “He’s begging the ref.”

Actually, I didn’t need Luke to teach me about flopping. I’d seen plenty of it in the classroom.

What appeared to be only slights—a side-ways look, a off-hand remark, a jostle—could sometimes bring on meltdowns. Students yelled, cried, lashed out, slammed doors, and ran away. One of my students took to completely shutting down, pulling his six-foot body into a fetal position on the floor.

Flopping is a big deal. That’s what Luke told me. Refs don’t like flopping. They can’t tell if someone’s really hurt. So NBA players are fined $2,000 for each flop.

And in the classroom, flopping is also big deal. Exaggerated emotion pulls other students from learning. But slapping hefty fines on students isn’t an option. So what’s a teacher to do?

Well, more than a referee. While referees call fouls and deal out penalties, teachers come alongside, helping students find healthy ways to express need. 

In-class flopping shows something bigger is wrong. It’s about more than the off-hand remark. It’s a call for help. What’s more important than stopping the flopping is finding what’s behind it—perhaps sensory overload or hunger or sickness or entitlement or hidden trauma.

Luke nudged me. On the basketball court a player had gone down.

“This isn’t a flop, Grandma, “Luke said. “Not this time. This is for real.”

As real, I thought, as the often-hidden reasons for classroom flopping.

I heard today that the Santa Claus of my childhood died. Not that we believed in Santa, Christmas being about Jesus. But if there were a Santa, I thought as a child, he’d have to be like Ken Troyer. I didn’t know anyone as generous as Ken Troyer, at least not to our family.

We were his project, our family of nine. My mom stretched my dad’s meager pastors’ salary far enough to feed us all. But not much was left for fun. And this became Ken’s calling.

Lucky for us Ken worked at the big JC Penny store in downtown Flint. There he might see a too-good-to-be-true sale or a slightly-damaged return. And some of these deals found their ways to our house—sometimes something useful like living room curtains; but other times something entirely extravagant like an electric race track large enough to fill the top of a ping-pong table.

And lucky for us that Ken had friends with cabins Up North, that magical playground below the Mackinac Bridge. Lots of our friends packed their cars on Friday nights and headed north to their cabins. It felt like a different country, they told us. They could build fires and see the stars and get away from Flint with its sirens and belching factory smokestacks. Ken talked to a friend, who gave us a week at his cabin, free.

But of all Ken’s generosities, the one that touched me most was the Jingle Jump skipping toy. Jingle Jumps were the rage at recess. Kids would strap the toy over the shoe of one foot, start swinging the string with the ball, and jump over the string with the other foot. All over the playground you could hear the jingling of bells hidden in the toy. Here and there, you could hear the singing of the Jingle Jump song.

When you're feeling down in the dump,
Get up and bounce to the Jingle Jump.
Just Jump.
That's all you've got to do.
Just jump.

I wanted a Jingle Jump. But I couldn’t ask my parents. So I made one. I cut up an old rubber boot and laced it around my foot with twine. I tied a shoestring to the twine and glued a toy ball on the end. It worked . . . kind of. But it was a sad affair. And it didn’t jingle.

Ken must have noticed. One day he stopped by our house, this time with a wrapped package. And it was for me.

“Thought you might like this,” he said.

Ken Troyer was my Santa Claus, for sure.

At his funeral this week, I’ll remember this kindness. And I’ll reflect on what it taught me—that generosity can reach far into the soul.