Tears welled up as I read the Facebook post during lunch today.  I was just sitting down to begin eating and had several notifications, one of them from a former student who tagged me in a post.  She wrote about several teachers who had made a difference in her life and I was blown away by the things she said and remembered about our time together as teacher and student.

The beginning of my career was pretty lackluster.  I had subbed for a couple of years, unable to find a job.  I was finally given the opportunity to teach by a man who provided music teachers to parochial schools in the Cincinnati area.  My first job was a disaster and I was pretty certain that I has chosen the wrong career but then I was offered a second part time job at a wonderful little school where I was able to do some fun things with the kids.  Then came the best job ever at another wonderful little school in Loveland Ohio where I met this remarkable student.

I now had 800 students, some classes as large as 32 in a little meeting room in the basement of the school/church.  It was a nice sun filled room next to the cafeteria with doors to the outside where we occasionally had class.  The PTA and the parish were kind to provide instruments and books for us and we had a great time.  Each grade level was responsible for some little program during the year.  I remember one performance in particular where we were asked to sing for a childhood friend of Anne Frank who was coming to speak to the students.  I chose a song in one of our books, a Hebrew folk song and hoped it would be okay.  She teared up as she heard it and began to sing along.  It was a song from her childhood and she told me how much she enjoyed it.  I had many opportunities like this with my students, but the most fun I had was doing choir and theater.

It was in these smaller groups that I really got to know my kids.  The choir sang around the community and competed at several contests.  We were asked to sing for opening of  the National Catholic Educators Conference.  My girls worked hard and sang beautifully and we had a great time together.  However, it was putting together our plays that was the most fun.  Great little 3rd grade musicals during Christmas time and junior high musicals in the spring where these kids discovered talents they didn’t know they had.  Parents got involved creating wonderful costumes and we had a team of teachers who handled all of the peripheral needs like sets, make-up, programs, tickets, etc.  It was a ball and a great way for the school community to work together to provide musical entertainment for the parish community.  And it was a blast.

Just as I felt like I was really creating something there, it became necessary for my family to move and my heart was broken.  I went to visit about a year later when the principal was retiring and as I walked onto the playground during the school day, I was swarmed by literally classes of children, all wanting a hug.  It was a bittersweet day for sure.  It took about two years before I began to get over leaving that great little school with my wonderful colleagues and students.

Since then, as it tends to be when God has a bigger picture in mind for you than you do, life has become a great adventure in directions I would never have imagined had I stayed where I was.  However, this post, for a little while, took me back to a sweet time with a once in a lifetime group of kids who helped me grow as a teacher and as a person.  And while teachers, especially elementary teachers, may never know what kind of influence they had on their students, I was blessed today with the knowledge that maybe I made a real difference in the lives of those kids almost 20 years ago.  In a day and age where teachers can feel very unappreciated by those outside of the profession, this gave me an indescribable emotional boost.  So grateful.