27 May 2006
Pomp and Circumstance

Filed under work

My tenth commencement ceremony as a teacher.

Graduation night really is the best night of the year. It’s just impossible not to feel a sense of accomplishment and pride when a group of students you’ve worked with and known takes that last step. You remember where they were, and you think about where they are, and you know you played at least a tiny part in that, and that’s no small deal. My favorite moment of every ceremony is when, after the tassel-turning, the graduates just stand there and the audience stands and claps. I always stand there, shoulder to shoulder with my colleagues, clapping the most sincere clapping I ever do.

We had a lovely ceremony, as we always do, and though I don’t think our ceremonies are as classy as those at HBA, they have a few things going for them that HBA’s don’t have. When your graduating class numbers only eighteen, you can do a lot more with the time you have, including something that’s become a tradition: The Senior Video, filmed and edited by a couple of the seniors. They work all year on this thing (seriously, all year) and they can make sure that everyone is well represented (something that would be difficult with a larger class).

Classic only-at-ASSETS moment: Some graduates participated in the ceremony by reading poems they thought were appropriate for the moment. This was a new thing. One boy, a very friendly, very cheerful, very spirited, very dyslexic young man, read Roethke’s “The Waking,” and repeatedly read the line “I wake to sleep and take my waking slow” as “I wake to sleep and take my WALKING slow.” Pretty cute.

This is the second time my name was mentioned during a valedictory address (my name was also mentioned last year during a salutatory address). In 1998, Sherrie said something about my bringing Spam musubis to the airport the morning the HBA math bowl team left to compete on the Big Island. That was really nice. This evening, Mimi named a couple of other memorable teachers, and said, “And Mr. Dwyer’s hands-on activities that made abstract math concepts seem more real. Everyone knows Mr. D rocks!”

That was nice, too. You can’t measure your worth as a teacher by your popularity (I have known popular teachers who SUCK and unpopular teachers who are quite good), and it is never my goal to be liked by my students. However, since I am not quite so gifted as many of my colleagues in teaching ability, one thing I have to rely on is my ability to love my students. If they shoot some love back at me, I think I am successfully communicating to them that I loved them first, and that goes a long way when you have to correct their work or their behavior.

I have two favorite teachers from when I was in high school. One was my math teacher, and I was lucky enough to have her for Algebra II, for precal, and for calculus. This is a woman who can teach, and I mean she could teach a wider range of students than I would think possible. Or maybe I just feel that way because she could teach me. I am not bad at memorizing formulae and plugging information into them, and I am not bad at deciding which mathematical concepts need to be applied to which situations, but in order for me to get all that stuff, I need to be able to ask critical questions about the math — questions that usually begin with “Why…” or “What if…” My high school math teacher saw that my questions were important to me, and she never brushed me off. She always gave me an answer that helped me understand the math beneath the math, and this is why I know that math is poetry. She is a right-brained person teaching a left-brained subject, and that made a world of difference to me. I am a literature teacher and a math teacher because she was my math teacher, because she loved me enough to teach me the way I needed to be taught.

My other favorite teacher was my eighth-grade social studies teacher, and I had her again in tenth grade for Bible and then in twelfth grade for World Religions. She was my favorite teacher of all time from the first day I sat in her social studies class. This woman was certainly a terrific teacher, but that’s not what made her my favorite. All she did was love you. She loved you when you were lovable and she loved you when she had to yell at you for being an idiot, and we all knew it and we all responded in kind. I do not know how she communicated this love, because it’s not like we spent much time off-task in her classes. It was just clear in the way she spoke to you individually, in the way she addressed the class, and in the way she gave us all those numbers and events in the American Revolution and Civil War.

Seriously, I don’t know how she did it, but I strive to do that every day. When you love your students first, when you make that your starting point, how do you not love coming to work almost every day? Sure, there are days when it’s tough to feel that love, but love isn’t just a feeling, which is why I know I can say, “You know I love and respect you Bobby, but this is not a good day to speak to me at all, because I’m extremely annoyed with you and I’m worried that I might say something harmful to you if you keep talking to me!” My eighth-grade social studies teacher said something like that to me once (okay, more than once!) and it felt great.

I sometimes have to remind myself to love the kids; it’s true. I get so caught up in the “must-dos” of the job — the paperwork, the syllabi, the course objectives — that I forget that all of those things serve to support the backbone of my very reason for being there. I love those students and want them to know what I know: That the world is beautiful and that they are a beautiful part of it. Forget about college and SATs and GPAs. We read Coleridge not because he helps our vocabulary or because he helps us get into Harvard; we read Coleridge because he’s beautiful. I make you read Coleridge because I love you and because I want to share this beauty with you. You know how the formula for the surface area of a sphere is the first derivative of the formula for the volume of a sphere? Same thing. Beautiful.

So it is a few hours after our ceremony has ended, thus dropping the Grand Drape on my tenth year of teaching, and I think of those ten graduating classes I have known, and I am reminded again of why I will do this for another ten, and probably beyond, though it break my heart again and again. I just pray that God shows me a little more each year about how to love. Perhaps I’ll pick up a little bit about how to teach along the way, too.

2006-05-27  ::  me