PostScript: Happy Mother's Day

The smile entry is incomplete – there is more to that story…

Many years (at least a couple of decades!) ago I was teaching first grade at a public school in Melbourne, Florida. I was in my third year of teaching – finally feeling like I was getting a handle on all of it. My mother came to visit and spend the day in the classroom. I was excited and eagerly anticipated sharing my 29 children and my work with my dearest friend and mentor. The day was unremarkable and ordinary, except for our special visitor. We read about Buffy and Mack in our basal readers and subtracted and read literature and played outside and read more literature and did some social studies and sang a song or two. (Aside – I got my bibliophile tendencies from my mother.) It was just another day in a string of days in our first grade classroom. Unremarkable in its ordinariness.

On the way home I asked my mother what she thought about our day in first grade. She shared her impressions of all those little bodies in that small space. She understood why I always talked about having bruises from bumping into tables. We talked about the personality bubbling up out of that enthusiastic group. She got to hear one of the children share his theory of why dinosaurs “got extinct. Because they didn’t take baths.” We dissected the read alouds and the childrens’ responses to the books. She expressed surprise that I sang in public.

Then my mother said, “But I thought you would smile more.”

I loved my work teaching those first graders. I was passionate about learning – theirs and my own. It was such a privilege to observe the burgeoning literacy of those six and seven year old children. It gave me great joy. But how would people know that?

Even more importantly, how would those 29 children know?

I would smile more.

Didn’t those children deserve that?

My mother has been gone a long time and I have not been an elementary school teacher for an even longer time.  But I smile more. I spend at least two days per week in elementary school classrooms in my work as a teacher educator. And I smile more. Often as I debrief with my teacher candidates I admonish them to smile more.  Every graduate class I teach I hear my mother’s voice and I smile more.  It is a way of life.

Thanks Mom!