Because of a Teacher

Stories of the Past to Inspire the Future of Education

George Couros

• Publisher: Impress
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781948334006
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

What you do matters.You may not hear it often (or ever), but if you're an educator, you're making a difference in the lives of learners. And that impact has a domino effect. In Because of a Teacher, more than fifteen of today's leading educators remember the teachers and administrators who inspired and supported their careers. Through a series of heartfelt and uplifting stories, they reflect on their early years teaching, offering advice and strategies suited to first-year teachers and longtime educators alike.These personal stories offer hope for new teachers, encouragement for educators tiptoeing into burnout, and reassurance that the work you're doing right now will inspire generations to come.

Part I

Who Is a Teacher Who Inspired You and Why?

1

If You Only Knew

Dr. Jody Carrington

Every child deserves a champion—an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be.

Rita Pierson

Her name was Mrs. Holly Nordstrom. She taught in a small rural town in a K–12 school that held about five hundred students every year. In 1991, she was my tenth-grade teacher. (She doubled as the school guidance counselor. Like I said, small town.)

Mrs. Nordstrom was a second-generation teacher. Her own children went to this school. The staff room consisted mostly of relatives and at least a few teachers who once attended as students. This farming community was a family. And just like most families, everyone knew everything about everybody. On many days, this wasn’t easy.

I started kindergarten with twenty-two other kids. I would attend high school in that same building and graduate with eighteen of those same kids. I can tell you the first and last name of every teacher I had in every one of those grades. I knew where most of them lived. I babysat for a few of them. Made fun of most of them. Admired so many of them.

The school secretary was the same woman throughout my twelve years there—and the mom of the twins in my class. The custodian’s name was Mrs. Sheets, and she had the best laugh. My bus driver’s name was Stan. He picked me up and dropped me off every day from grades three to twelve. He was a crotchety old soul, and I loved him.

There was something even more special about Mrs. Nordstrom. To this day, I have no idea what class she taught me. It could have been social studies. Or it might have been language arts. I’ve long forgotten those details, but there’s one that has stayed with me all these years.

On April 29, 1991, she delivered one of the most profound lessons I’d ever heard, and it had nothing to do with literacy or numeracy. The day was like any other: teenaged souls trying to navigate friendships and fit in. That sunny afternoon, she gathered us in a small classroom. She stood there, teary, to tell us that one of the kids in our tenth-grade class—a popular, kind, handsome kid named Neil—had been killed that day in an accident during a work experience placement. I remember where she stood as she said those words. I remember what she was wearing. And this sounds creepy even as I write this, but I remember how she smelled (Wild Musk by Coty from the local drugstore). I have no idea what she said, but I vividly remember how I felt. In the midst of a tragedy, as a sixteen-year-old kid, I remember thinking something like this: if the big people are in charge, the little people will be OK.

Maybe what I remember most, however, was navigating the next few weeks. I wanted to help somehow and stay connected to his family. I don’t remember having conversations about this with my own parents, but I distinctly remember sitting in Mrs. Nordstrom’s office and asking her what you do when someone dies. I asked her if I should take things to Neil’s parents. She answered all of my questions, so solid and reassuring where I was breaking. I can now imagine that she, too, was heartbroken.

There was no script for this in many of our sixteen-year-old stories. She never stopped saying Neil’s name, making it OK for us to keep talking about him, too. As his funeral was planned, she asked his closest friends about the songs he listened to and the things he loved. The first few bars of Garth Brooks’s “The Dance” still take my breath away.

I now understand that she was teaching us the difference between grief and mourning. Grief is the response to loss. In fact, where loss lives, grief will follow. Grief is the soul-crushing experience that is, remarkably, universal to us all. Grief pays no mind to age, race, religion, socioeconomic status, or gender identity. It’s a unique experience that often occurs in isolation, and it can punch you in the gut when you least expect it.

Mourning, on the other hand, is how you heal. How you make sense of all the pain. Mourning is typically done in connection with others who are also grieving, and it often involves stories, laughter, and joy. Mourning, for school-aged kids trying to figure out how you make sense of loss and grief, often happens at school.

You’re not born with the capacity to mourn. Someone has to show you how. For myself and many of my classmates, in the midst of a tragedy full of grief, Mrs. Nordstrom was one of those navigators. Not because she wanted to be or because she had any specific knowledge of how a small community ought to deal with the sudden death of a young man they knew too well. Because she was a teacher. And that’s so much of what teachers do. They show students how to make sense of the hard things. Like how to mourn.

As is often the case during transitional moments, I had no idea how much that day and the weeks that followed would affect the way I wanted to show up in the world. Even as I write this, I am fully aware of how much each person in that small school had the potential to (and indeed did) profoundly impact my story.

Now, almost twenty-five years after that day, I am sitting in my office with a PhD. I speak on stages around North America. I have a best-selling book about kids and relationships, another book on the way called Teachers These Days, a psychology practice, and a beautiful family. And I am only starting to realize the power of teachers. I have been lucky enough to have had some of the best.

Significant amounts of time and investment are spent on curriculum and programs, training teachers to be pedagogically sound. But none of that mattered that day. And I wonder, truly, if it matters at all in the grand scheme of things. Does it matter during the most important lessons that students learn in any school?

These are lessons of acknowledgment and connection. Lessons that grief will come and that mourning will require bravery. And lessons that we were never meant to navigate any of the hard things alone.

So many of my greatest teachers came in the forms of bus drivers, custodians, and educational assistants. Relationships know no hierarchy, but they know kindness and connection—especially when things are hard. In tough times, you can’t tell kids how to manage big emotions; you have to show them. That’s where the magic happens. The rest—the integration of literacy and numeracy—will follow accordingly.

Even after telling this story onstage many times, it never occurred to me to tell Mrs. Nordstrom (she will always be Mrs. Nordstrom to me) how important she’d been to me that day. In fact, I didn’t do that until I saw her at a talk I gave some twenty years later. She was in the crowd, but as I told the story about how she taught us to make sense of Neil’s death, I couldn’t look at her. The gratitude, the connection to a woman who felt like home even though I hadn’t seen her in over twenty years, sat like a lump in my throat.

I was nervous as I spoke, knowing she was listening. (I never get nervous, by the way.) After the talk, I crossed the school gym to talk to her. I honestly felt like that sixteen-year-old kid again. She had remarried. As she introduced me to her new husband, I asked her if she knew just how amazing she was. Her husband clearly knew, but it appeared Holly, in all her wisdom, had no idea.

I asked her if she remembered that day, addressing a roomful of sixteen-year-olds with news about Neil. She said, and I remember these words distinctly, “Oh, Jody. You never forget losing a student. I loved that boy. But I don’t remember talking to you all, specifically, that day.”

I assured her that there were nineteen of us who would never forget. And that it changed the trajectory of my life. When I grabbed her hands and thanked her sincerely for all she had given me (and countless other students, no doubt), she responded as most teachers do, “Oh,” she said, “it’s just what we do.”

In my office, I’ve hung a quote by the philosopher Ram Dass that reminds me of the lesson Mrs. Nordstrom taught me all those years ago. It reads, “We are all here, walking each other home.”

It’s perhaps the most profound sentence I have ever read. Is there any more important job on the planet? We are all wired for connection—it’s biologically necessary, in fact. We have everything we need, in this moment, to do the things that matter most in this world: connect with others, be there for them, and guide them. You, dear teachers, do this every single day. And the vast majority of you have no idea just how many stories you’re a part of.

As a mom to school-aged children, I now have a whole new appreciation for teachers who work so hard to hold the emotions of the tiny humans who mean so much to me. The more time I spend talking to educators about trauma, grief, and how relationships are the answer to it all, the better I understand the impact this heart work often has on them. We don’t talk about that nearly enough.

And we don’t acknowledge just how sacred this work is for so many reasons that have nothing to do with report cards. The best educators who have left the biggest legacies understand one thing: the most important moments in a teacher’s career rarely have anything to do with the curriculum. My wish most days is that teachers only knew the scope of their influence. In fact, I think frequent and gentle reminders of the incredible impact you have on so many are critical to keeping your hearts full as you continue to change the world.

In the spirit of all the Mrs. Nordstroms in the world, my hope is that when you get tired, you will think back on the three or four or twenty-five students who you’ll never forget. The ones who remembered your birthday. The ones you lost sleep over. The ones you wished you could have back. The ones you considered taking home to raise as your own. The ones who made you question whether you’d survive the school year. The ones who died.

I promise you, if you can picture them in your head right now, they and their families think about you ten times as much. If you only knew. Many of them will never be able to tell you.

As you journey through the stories in these chapters, taking in the ways in which educators have inspired others, I hope you realize how powerful you are. How many stories you’re a part of. How many lives you have impacted. I hope you will breathe deeply and know that despite all the heartache, the lost sleep, the lack of support and resources and acknowledgment, you matter more than most in this world. Because you are a teacher. And I, for one, am so grateful you are.

Three Questions for Conversation

1. What are some ways we can recognize our support staff and the contributions they make to our school community?
2. What is one way that we can authentica...

Table of contents

• Praise for Because of a Teacher
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Moving Forward: I Will Cherish the Impact You Have Had on My Life Forever
• Acknowledgments
• More from IMPRESS