Author: Phyllis Swartz

One last night of vigil.

One last prayer.

One last breath.

But memories that last.

In my almost seventy years, I had never kept vigil. This month, I’ve done it twice, once with a friend and tonight with my mother-in-law. Lighting in her room is muted, medicine charts line the table, and the oxygen machine hums and hisses and crackles in a certain rhythm. From the bed comes the more uncertain whiffled breathing of my mother-in-law.

Otherwise, the room is hushed. Besides the rise and fall of her chest, my mother-in-law is unmoving—all of her, but most notably her hands. They lay by her sides, age spotted and veined, no longer gripping a cane or a hoe or the hand of a child, no longer shelling peas or writing letters, no longer holding a telephone to her ear.

 I wonder how many hours she listened. When we traveled from Ohio to visit her in Mt. Morris, Michigan, we’d sit in her kitchen and watch as the world seemed to call. People called her from prison cells, from across the street, from across the country, from sick beds, and from shoebox-sized rooms at the YMCA. We’d watch her wind her long phone cord through the kitchen, the receiver wedged between her shoulder and her ear, so she could chop and mix and sauté as she listened and sympathized and guided.

For most of her ninety-nine years, she lent an ear and gave a hand. And that’s why the stillness of this room is so striking. It doesn’t fit my mother-in-law. Nor does it fit me. I’m not given to such quietude. Keeping vigil, I am finding, is a time to stay in place, to pray and sing and touch and remember. In this room, a reverence seems to be rising. And in this sacred space, we wait.

I dropped out in first grade. I kept going to school, where I loved to read and write and add and subtract. But in the middle of my very first art lesson, I began to hate art. And all through grade school, I never changed my mind.

On the other side of the classroom windows, autumn had hit its stride as trees let loose their orange and gold and berry-red leaves. The teacher gestured toward this swirling show and brightly announced the fall art project.

I was with her. Already she had shown me that math was beautiful and precise, that words on a page opened windows to faraway places and long-ago times, that with my pencil I could transport a thought from my mind to a paper. So when she held up red and orange and brown construction paper and scissors and glue, I expected more magic.

“Snip the paper into little pieces,” she told us. “These will become leaves that you’ll glue to the branches of the tree you’ll draw.”

The gluing undid me. My fingers became so drenched that the snips clung to them instead of the branches. The snips bled their colors into the glue, staining my hands orange and gold and berry-red. And when I dabbed with a tissue, it stuck and shredded until my hands seemed trapped like a fly in the web of a spider.

This is when I gave up on art.

And this was a moment I remembered as I taught the dropouts in my classes. They were also caught in webs. Their brains worked fine but their pencils couldn’t deliver. Or their attention was hijacked by every movement and sight and smell in the room. Or their emotions were laid open, raw and bleeding from last night’s beating with a belt buckle.

The impact of a failed art project is nothing compared to being at the end of a belt buckle or learning with a brain that doesn’t fit usual teaching styles. But that first-grade memory made me a better teacher, moving me to provide ways out of webs, not enlarge them.

Though I was a restless kid, I could spend hours watching records spin. By placing a record on the turntable and dropping the stylus into a groove, I could hear the Obernkirchen Children’s choir sing “The Happy Wanderer” or Horowitz play Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” or my Miller family harmonize “Night on the Hills” in four parts on one of the long-play records they made.

How could these sounds that belonged in Germany and Carnegie Hall and the mountains of Western Maryland come out of the grooves and through the speaker to fill our living room in Flint, Michigan?

As the music played, I’d watched the stylus follow its intricate path, moving back and forth, back and forth, as the record rotated, but always—well, almost always—staying in the groove.

The habits of the stylus were in contrast to my helter-skelter life. I left books at school when I needed them for homework and at home when I needed them for class. Books and magazines littered my bedroom floor. I stayed up late reading and slept past my alarm. For these transgressions, I received detentions and demerits and extra work at home.

In contrast to my haphazard ways, I admired how the stylus found the groove and made music by steadfastly following it. When I heard the idiom in the groove, I knew exactly what it meant. And I began to see that for something to be groovy—as we, in that day, called anything marvelous or excellent—someone had likely followed a purposeful path.

I remember my conscious decision in seventh grade to get into groove. That’s when I began devising systems to tame my scattered life. I stuffed reminder notes into my shoes and kept homework lists. I put my books in my school satchel every night before I went to bed. And when I got out of groove, I looked for ways to get back in.

Ever since seventh grade, I’ve kept adapting my systems. I no longer stuff notes into my shoes. But I snooze emails to remind me of deadlines and set my cell phone clock and keep lists and follow daily routines.

It’s easier, these days, to play Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” All I have to do is ask Alexa. But I miss placing a record on a turntable and watching the stylus run through the grooves.

I grew up in a one-bathroom house. And with no second half-bath tucked away in the corner, nine of us competed for that space.

Even with no one in it, the bathroom was cramped with nine toothbrushes, a medicine cabinet that let go its contents if you opened the door, an almost-always empty roll of toilet paper on its holder, damp towels, a potty-chair in the corner, and a large toothpaste tube, squeezed in the middle. If you were sharing a sink to spit toothbrush water with a sibling, the walls seemed to bulge.

To take a bath, I had to first take a poll. I’d go through the entire house, asking everyone the same question.

“Do you have to go to the bathroom?”

This is how I learned early to distrust polls. Just as I’d sink into hot soapy water, a younger sibling would bang on the door.

“Gotta go!”

“I just ask you five minutes ago,” I’d begin, even though I already knew the answer.

“Didn’t have to go then!”

Our parents weren’t sympathetic. They, after all, had grown up with outhouses and chamber pots. Going to them with our complaints was sure to bring on stories of holding noses while emptying chamber pots, of bundling up while doing the bathroom dance before traipsing through snow to sit on an ice-cold seat, and of then trying to do your business while you shivered away.

“Way back when,” my dad would say, “even kings and queens didn’t have it as good as you do. This will teach you to deal with life.”

He was right, and here’s what we learned:

• To be efficient—Get in and get out, this was the mantra. No reading on the toilet, no dawdling in the tub, no daydreaming in front of the mirror. And if something, like combing hair or clipping nails, could be done outside the bathroom, find some other place.
• To be aware of human biological realities—A lot of earthy things happened in that tiny bathroom. We saw filled-up potty chairs and globs of toothpaste spit in the sink, and we could tell when a little brother hadn’t bothered to take an aim. The sights and smells and sounds of that room toughened us to change our children’s diapers a decade later and, still later, to care for elderly parents.
• To give way when others’ needs encroach on our own—We learned to speed it along at a knock on a door and to form a line and wait for a turn. But we also discovered that to be equitable, things can’t always be equal—that, for example, younger children would be moved ahead of us in line.

And though we didn’t appreciate these one-bathroom house lessons then, they helped us grow up.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should mention that our family had an escape hatch, a luxury most families on our street didn’t have. Living in a parsonage, the church, with two perfectly good restrooms, was just across the drive. And we knew how to get in the back door.

My dad was right. Way back when, even kings and queens didn’t have it this good.

Last week, the walls came tumbling down. As I stood at the demolition site of the crumpling, century-old school, my mind took me back. Hands clammy cold and heart pounding, I had walked through its columned doors and up a wide staircase to interview with the principal for a teaching job.

“Your kids got you the job,” he told me later. “They went through this school on auto-pilot.”

Noticing my raised eyebrow, he added, “That and your credentials.”

Computers first came to school while I was teaching in this building, and with them came word-processing and the internet.

“How can we teach kids to spell,” we wondered aloud during lunch in the teachers’ lounge, “when they have spell-check? How will we teach to them to research when they have the internet?”

In those first years of my teaching, I didn’t have much in my toolbox. To discipline students, for example, I relied on issuing demerits and sending kids to the office.

“Don’t make the office the authority in your classroom,” the assistant principal warned me. “Be your own authority.

In this now-collapsing building, I had discovered how to do this, one hard lesson at a time.

As the excavating machines rumbled on, grabbing at brick and mortar with their jaws, I stared at the empty sky where my old classroom had been. Of all my old classrooms, I had loved this one the most. It had high ceilings, generous windows, oiled, wide-plank floors, and miles of slate chalkboards that accepted chalk eagerly, making each marking so vivid it drew the eyes. And around the sides of the room was plenty of space for bookshelves and quiet nooks.

But no matter its charm, the school had to come down. Water had been freezing and thawing in the walls, bricks were falling off its exterior, plaster was bubbling up in the classrooms, and if you took a wrong step, your foot might go right through the floor.

It was an old, worn-out school, but still I felt sad.

I brought a brick home with me. I’d like to think it came from wall outside my classroom. I plan to chip the mortar off it and use it as a bookend for my how-to-teach books. But I don’t need a brick to remember the classroom where I learned more from my students than they learned from me.

It had been a rough morning. I climbed to the top of the stairs and wondered what I had come to get. I stood at the gas pump trying to remember my zip code. All that came to mind was the passcode to my dad’s MyChart, the phone number of my long-dead grandparents, and my social security number, which I hadn’t been able to remember when I renewed my passport. In the grocery store someone gave me a hug, and I hugged back thinking, who is this person?

All this, and then I had the audacity to spend the afternoon teaching a college class where the topic was intelligence.

“I’m past my peak,” I said to them. “You don’t want me on your team in an escape room, and if you and I competed to solve a Rubik’s Cube, you’d win, for sure.”

And I told them about the zip code problem at the gas pump and the people whose names I keep forgetting, even people I’ve known well.

“I’ll probably forget your names,” I told them.

What I didn’t tell them, was that I didn’t know most of their names. No longer able to memorize even the names of students right in front of me, I’d been faking my way through the term.  

They sat there in their glorious youth—skin without wrinkles, muscles taut, and hair elegant or wildly sloppy, according to their tastes—and regarded me with a mixture of doubt and pity.

“You’re at your peak with fluid intelligence,” I said. “You’re quick to solve puzzles and remember names and analyze new information and adapt to your environment.”

I let this penetrate into their youthful brains.

“You may be fast,” I continued, “But I’m rich.”

And I let that sink in.

“I’ve got crystalized intelligence.”

I explained that what I’ve learned from decades of living and from books I’ve read and from people I’ve met and places I’ve been—all this is stored in my brain. I’ve thought about what I’ve learned. And in my brain, I’ve bumped ideas up against each other to form new ideas. And from this vast store, I can pull what I need.

They didn’t know how I was pulling from this store to teach them, that though I didn’t know their names, I knew who they were. After teaching thousands of students, I could pick up on the nuances necessary to teach each of them well. From the first day, I’d known that one student would need an off-hand, from-the-side approach if I were to connect with him, that another would welcome a direct challenge, and that another needed to be buoyed up with assurance. I understood more about some of these students than they understood about themselves.

 “In new situations,” I told them, wrapping up class, “I may be slow on the uptake. But when I get there, watch out.”

And their eyes no longer held pity.

Maybe I should take up screenwriting. I’ve seen plenty of students move through the same stages as characters in a movie.

Take Misty, for example. I spotted her the first day of class, a bad-tempered kid with fists balled, muscles tensed, and lips pressed into a sneer. Her classmates gave her wide berth.

But I had taught long enough to keep watching for a softening of the eyes or a lifting of the head or the drooping of the shoulders—to catch a sign that Misty longed for something else. It came when the stone hit Tessie on the side of the head in Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery.” In that moment, compassion joined the anger in Misty’s eyes.

I pulled my stool next to her desk while students were writing their responses to Jackson’s story.

“This story makes me mad,” I whispered to her.

“Ain’t right,” she said, not whispering. “Just ‘cause somethin’ always happened, don’t make it right.”

I nodded, dared to squeeze her shoulder, and left her to her writing.

Literature helped Misty move toward her essence, revealing that under her anger was a person with a keen sense of justice and empathy for the underdog. It didn’t always show. Misty still earned plenty of demerits. Not long after, she was suspended for fighting in the lunch room. But when we read, her eyes showed that anger was not all that defined Misty.

“Could I read this to the class?” I began asking about her reading responses. “I think it will help them understand what they read.”

At first, her nods were curt. But one day, she motioned me to come to her desk and handed me her writing.

“Would this help?” she asked.

Misty, we were all discovering, was more than a hothead.

Whatever it took—this was Zach’s modus. He wanted fame more than anything, even if it edged on notoriety. And fame is hard to achieve in middle school if you aren’t athletic or rich or popular or smart or funny. But this didn’t stop Zach from trying.

“Sorry, Mrs. Swartz,” he’d say as he walked late into my class.

He’d clear his throat to be sure his voice reached the far corners of my just-settled class.

“I got called to the principal’s office again. This time for a consultation about how to increase school spirit.”

One day the superintendent dropped by my class unannounced. We were in a writing workshop, and I continued to conference with a student as the superintendent walked the aisles observing student work, his eyes alert and hands clasped behind his back.

Lucky me, it was a picture-perfect class. Students were absorbed in research and drafting and editing. And then as the superintendent neared Zach’s desk, I saw Zach straighten his back and clear his throat.

None of us on the faculty or staff ever addressed the superintendent without the title of doctor. And certainly, no student ever dared.

Except for Zach.

“Hi, there, Jake!” he said, skipping the title, not bothering with the proper name, and landing directly on the nickname.

It didn’t take the superintendent long to leave the room.

Zach had just demonstrated once again what repeated studies show, that students want to be associated with fame. More than financial success or achievement or a sense of community, they want people to give them attention and know their names.

They want this so much that if nothing else works, they turn to trouble, an easy and cheap way to get attention, a kind of faux form of fame.

There’s no sense in fighting this. Attention seekers win every time. But teachers who work proactively to draw out the essence of each student and make it visible to others, reduce their need for notoriety. What these teachers offer, instead, is life-giving ways to be known.