Tattoo

I’m not a tattoo person.  But, I find some of them really beautiful and lots of them come with interesting and meaningful stories.  I enjoy asking my students about them and seeing them delightedly telling me the background of the design.  So it was a strange sensation when today my hand surgeon (routine checkup) asked me about mine.  I asked him what he meant. “That spot on your pinky finger is a tattoo.  Well, we call it that.  It came from a pencil point.  You must have had it for a long time because it seems to be fading a bit.”  “Yes! I got this in 1961.”  Wow! I have a tattoo.  And really, I have often looked down at that spot and fondly remembered the time I absolutely realized I was born to be a teacher.  I was in 6th grade in New York City, and one day in the spring I came across a first grade girl in the bathroom crying—sobbing.  She couldn’t write, she told me, and her teacher said she was stupid and would not be promoted to second grade.  Her name was Marina, she said, and her parents didn’t speak very much English so they could never help her with her work.  Somehow, I sensed I could be of use to her.  I told her I’d help her at recess.  So, after lunch we sat down on the cold asphalt play yard and I asked her to show me how she made her letters.  She was really shaky and her first attempt with a very sharply pointed pencil stabbed me in the pinky. I wrapped it in tissues and just kept going.  I recognized the problem right away—the pencil was too thin for her hands.  I arranged to meet her the next day and came equipped with a fat pencil, crayons, a notebook, and several books from the library.  It worked!  From then on we would sit almost every day and write or read.  Soon a few more kids from her class started to join us and we had quite a gang together writing notes and reading stories.  And I realized:  this is what it meant to be a teacher—to not only have skills, but to share them to help others become stronger.  And to realize that everyone has different needs and sometimes just a small adjustment in materials or attitude can make a huge difference.  At the end of the year Marina was promoted.  Her parents came to the school to pick her up and they asked to meet with Miss Sylvia.  No one had any idea who this was.  Finally Marina saw me in the hall and waved me down excitedly.  Her mother, with tears in her eyes, handed me several loaves of freshly baked bread.  “So kind. So kind,” she kept repeating.  “For you.  This bread it rises in the right temperature.  So my Marina.  You give her the temperature she needed. Thanks you.”  And she hugged me.  And I knew (I KNEW) this was my life’s calling.  And now in my 48th year of teaching, I still know what a privilege it is to empower others with whatever skills and knowledge and warmth I can bring.  See my tattoo?  It’s who I am: a teacher.

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