My daughter just graduated from high school. Her graduation party was a week prior. Her favorite teacher of all time came to the party. She just happened to be her 8th grade English teacher. I find that special because my favorite teacher of all time was my 6th grade English teacher. What is it about middle school English teachers that makes them so especially memorable and lovable?
We were talking with Ms. Barber about her career. It turns out she also taught my best friend, the current Principal of the high school from which my daughter graduated, and several other notable adults in the community. That notion messed with my mind because Ms. Barber is very youthful. She isn’t bent over a walker and barely clinging to life. That is the picture my mind paints when I think of retired teachers. Maybe I think that because I know teaching would suck the very life from me. I cannot fathom teaching for 30-40 years and still being cute and spry. I am certain I would be permanently crusty and sharp in as few as 5 years of teaching.
The reason I believe middle school English teachers end up especially memorable is because they are the ones at that age that force us, by way of assignments, to consider who we are and what we are about. In the lower grades we have show-and-tell or we draw pictures of our experiences. Middle school is where we start stringing sentences together in meaningful ways. It is there where we experience writing prompts that make us think. If we are fortunate, like me and my daughter, at some point during that phase of life we encounter a teacher that helps us realize how special we are. If not that, they help us discover our strengths. My 6th grade English teacher did that for me. Ms. Barber did that for my daughter.
The conversation with Ms. Barber made me start thinking about our legacies. I don’t know Ms. Barber personally. I don’t know why she chose to be a teacher. I can imagine her as a young teacher, fresh from college, bright eyed and bushy tailed, setting out to mold young minds. I wonder if she considered then what retirement would look like. I wonder if she considered what her legacy would be. I wonder if she had any inkling who she would impact and what their legacies would be. Or, I wonder if she, like myself, and I imagine most people just thought she was choosing a reasonable career and didn’t consider much beyond that. I will be transparent here and say I don’t typically think beyond my own day to day. My driving questions are simpler things like “What will pay the bills?” and “How will I afford multiple pairs of cute shoes?”.
I wish we all had access to a time machine. I wish that we could see, even if only for a few seconds, how we could impact the world. We get distracted. Our culture forces us down old rutted out roads that offer few options. Maybe we just need a middle school English refresher course every few years. We need something or someone to force us to think about who we are and what we are about. Then we could use that as our driving data. I would be willing to bet the world would be a better place if we were helped and encouraged to live from who we are instead of what we want.
I was having a conversation with my sister-in-law about writing. I was sharing how odd it feels to type out my thoughts and upload them to the internet where literally anyone can read them. It feels even stranger that I am actively seeking new readers. I am marketing my thoughts. That notion is odd because I am just me. I am known by relatively few people. Who am I to tell anyone about anything? Who am I to dole out insight? I am just an average almost 50-year-old with a penchant for stringing words together. So what?
My answer, and yours, is our legacies matter. We don’t have a time machine. We aren’t forced to repeat middle school English every few years. Most of us will likely never get the blessing of knowing how we helped another person. We will, however, leave a legacy. That, for me, is reason enough to indulge the inner drive to type out my experiences and share them. What piece of yourself have you hidden because you haven’t been reminded of your value? What has having been driven by the simple things kept you from pursuing? What type of legacy would you like to leave? How can you live more from who you are than from what you want? These are the questions we need to ask ourselves.