 “Miss Kuhner,” she told me, “I don’t see that you have the makings of a teacher.” It was the fall of 1970 and I was devastated. From as far back as I could remember I knew that I wanted to teach. My future was never in question. My senior year student teaching supervisor and education professor, Dr. McHugh, was delighted to place me with a very experienced teacher, Mrs. C. who I would follow throughout the day for a while, and then slowly I would take over one class for several weeks.
I sat in the back of the room and took notes as she taught remedial 12th grade, advanced 10th grade, and intermediate 9th grade English. I watched as she exacted responses from the students and reminded them of the daily quizzes. There was no discussion about the material. In the 12th grade class I had little use initially for taking notes since the lessons were very rote and, frankly, boring. Instead, my papers were full of details about the kids in the class—all of whom were frozen in their seats. “Donna looks scared again today. She’s biting her nails a lot. I wonder if she’s having problems understanding.” And, “Jeff keeps hitting his leg like it’s falling asleep. I’ve noticed that he limps a lot. Maybe he needs some help.” And, “Marcie has been wearing the same clothes for three days now and she looks so tired.” About the second week I saw some of the 12th grade students at lunch time and I began to talk with them and offered to give them extra help if they wanted it. Several were grateful and took me up on my offer and I began to get to know them a little bit. Carol, it turned out, wrote amazing poetry so I taught her about the sonnet form to try. Jeremy, I discovered, had terrible eye-sight but no money for glasses. I talked to the school counselor who directed him to an organization that would help. And when shy Sara , who was born in Cuba, discovered that my first language was Spanish, she was elated. “This means I can be something too!” she gushed. A few days later Mrs. C. met with me after school. “You should not be helping those students,” she informed me. “They need to know that they are not really high school material. They should just drop out and go get jobs.” I was stunned. “I don’t understand,” I said, “Shouldn’t we be trying to give them the best we can so that they can be the best version of themselves?” Her sudden piercing laugh scared me. “Have you taken a good look at these children? They will never make anything of their lives. Now the ones in my Grade 10 class, they are worth helping.” I was shaken. This was not really teaching. It was something else, but it was not teaching. When it came time for me to lead a class, Mrs. C. assigned me the 12th graders. I tried several different methods to engage the students. I told stories; I asked questions; I pointed to passages in the texts that were interesting and showed details about characters and ideas. They were not all successful lessons. Some were total flops. But I went back day after day determined to help them discover ideas in literature and in themselves. And at the end of my 8-week student teaching stint, Mrs. C. sat with my professor and me and gave me her assessment. “You simply don’t have what it takes. You have to face it. Find something else to do.” She pounded the edges of the papers she was holding on the dark oak table between us and started to pull her chair back to stand. Dr. McHugh stopped her. “Mrs. C. can you please tell me why specifically you think this?” And she was more than happy to detail all of my “silly” attempts at engaging the students and all of my naive notions about learning abilities, and my useless waste of time trying to get “those ignorant children” to understand. Dr. McHugh then thanked her for her time and very courteously walked her to the door. They spoke in hushed tones for a minute before she left abruptly. His dark brown eyes were flashing with rage by the time he faced me across the table. I was limp—a diminished young girl whose dreams were crumbling. I felt my entire existence to be a sort of sham. If I couldn’t be the one thing I felt in the very marrow of my bones I was meant to be, then who was I? He looked me squarely in the eyes. “You, Sylvia Kuhner,” he said, “are a teacher. You always have been you always will be. It’s not what you do; it’s who you are. Trust yourself. Mrs. C. has a very narrow view of the world. We will not be using her as a model again.” Then his gaze went to the window for a moment and back to me. “Every single child has dignity and deserves a chance to succeed. Every single child should be honored and supported and celebrated. And I know, I know, you feel the same way.” I nodded in full agreement. For days I went over and over the events, unable to reconcile the pieces, but delighted at Dr. McHugh’s assessment of my teaching potential. About a week later I talked about this with my friend Clara, a cafeteria worker at the college and a local town resident. “So who was this teacher you were workin’ with?” she asked. When I told her she laughed. “Oh, Mrs.C. Why everybody knows about her. She only likes the rich kids—she doesn’t think the rest of the kids should even be bothering with school.” She yelled over to Johnny who was sweeping up, “Hey, Sylvia here was told by Mrs. C. over at the high school that she’s never gonna’ be a good teacher. What d’ya think about that?” Johnny chuckled, “Well, I think that makes Sylvia about the best teacher in the whole world.” All three of us burst out laughing. “You know,” Clara said, “you can learn a lot from people like Dr. McHugh about what you want to be like, but you can also learn who you don’t want to be—like from Mrs. C. . Everybody can show you something about life.” I agreed. The following September I began my first job as a teacher to my very own 7th grade class at Lower Regional School in Cape May NJ. On the first day of school as I looked out into the sea of anxious, eager faces I knew I was in love. There was nothing else in the world that I wanted to do—nothing else that felt so meaningful or was so much fun. As my work continued, I reveled in my students’ successes and really worked to help them learn about the material, about life, and about themselves. I helped and prodded and nudged and played every single day. I loved each and every one of them. When our class picture was taken in October there was much giggling and twisting about as the photographer and I tried to produce an orderly portrait. Finally, to create a more somber tone I said to the class: “Imagine looking at this picture way in the future—maybe fifty years from now. You’re going to be so amazed at who you were in 1971. You’re getting this picture taken for the you of 2021.” This worked. Later, as we were adjusting ourselves into our normal classroom configuration, I asked them to think about their future selves and what they would be proud for having accomplished. There were all manner of responses. One girl wanted to cure cancer so no one else had to lose their mom to it like she did. One boy wanted to go into the Coast Guard like his dad and protect our coastlines. Another boy wanted to drive a giant truck all over the country. A girl wanted to be a hairstylist and have her own salon. And then Billy asked me, “So what do you want to be proud of in 2021, Miss Kuhner?” My answer was immediate, “Having been caring and helpful and inspiring to years and years and years of students.” And although the formats have changed in unimaginable ways, and my age-range shifted a long time ago from 7th grade to college, this September 2021, I am humbled and proud and delighted to say, I will start my 50th year as a teacher.  “I’m just so totally confused,” I said to my father. It was 1967 and I was home from my first year of college for Christmas break. I had been taking some intense courses in philosophy and in psychology and the ideas I encountered sent me into a mental vortex. I continued, “There’s so much pain and grief in the world and I know that I’m just one person. Why would I bother doing anything about it? It just doesn’t matter.” We were in our living room in apartment 6L in the New York City community we had lived in for the past seven years. The sky was the same gray as the concrete of the sidewalk below, the freezing temperature was reflected in the coat-bundled crowds rushing from one street to the next. When it started to sleet I felt that the universe itself was a metaphor for my dark mood.
Our doorbell rang. It was Mrs. Schneider from apartment 4E. “Oh, Sylvia it’s so wonderful to see you!” she exclaimed as I opened the door. “Here is something for you. I just baked it this morning.” She smiled and hugged me as she handed me a cloth-wrapped challah bread. “Hirshie helped me make this.” I thanked her and asked how Hirshie, her son, was doing. “Oh, he’s a fine boy you know. We are helping him as much as we can at home now. But he says we’re not as good as Miss Sylvia,” she chuckled. I laughed and said, “Well, please tell him that I’ll stop by to see him in a few days and that I have a new cross-word puzzle I made for him.” Then she left. “Where did that come from?” my father asked as he watched me put the bread on our kitchen counter. I explained. He nodded in recognition, “Wasn’t he the boy you tutored for several years? The one who the school said was unteachable?” Indeed, he was. Six years earlier when he was 6, the public school had said they were not able to keep him in class. He was disruptive and his behavior was so abnormal that he was expelled from first grade. His mother didn’t know what to do. I saw her carrying satchels of groceries in the elevator the day after his expulsion and she was crying. I got off at her floor with her as she explained the situation. “I don’t know what to do,” she continued in her thick Polish accent. “Max and me, we came to this country with nothing and we work so hard. I just want my little Hirshie to have a chance at life better than ours.” By now we were at her door. I helped her with her bags and met her rambunctious, curly-haired son. He tried to pull me down and then, unsuccessful, he started yelling at me. His words were only half comprehensible and when I didn’t respond, he hit my leg. His mother was horrified and admonished him in Polish. I recognized something in his scared and angry eyes—something I understood. Grabbing his small hand, I sat down on the floor with him and took an apple out of the grocery bag I was holding. “Say it, Hirchie—say A-p-el—” I demanded, sounding out the fruit’s name. At first he looked away, but I turned his face to look at mine. “In English. Say A-p-el.” I gently moved his mouth. When he said the word clearly, I clapped. We three smiled. Then I asked Mrs. Schneider to say the word in Polish, which to me sounded like “yabuko” and to tell him it was Polish. And so we began. It became more and more clear that Hishie was trying to combine the two languages he heard daily and with a young child’s frustration at not being understood, he lashed out in anger. I remembered learning English myself at that very age. Until I went off to boarding prep-school a few years later, I visited with Hirshie several times a week. I went with Mrs. Schneider to talk to the principal and help explain the situation. “Aha,” Mr. Wagner exclaimed. “Why, we should have figured that out. I am so sorry for this,” he continued. “I promise we will help him.” And they did. Every time I was home for school vacations I would stop in to see him or take him to the playground. By the time I went off to college in the fall of 1967 he was entering 8th grade and thriving. And now, this bleak winter day in 1967 as my father and I pulled apart the newly baked challah bread and smothered each slice with butter, he addressed my life-questions. “So, there’s too much pain in the world. You’re absolutely right, my daughter, there is. There is harshness and cruelty, and indifference, and down-right inhumanity.” We each took giant bites of the bread feeling its almost-sweetness and eggy richness. Then he continued, “What then should we each do? Do we do nothing? Maybe it feels like very little when you do something. Like with Hirshie. He’s just one boy. Why did you help him?” I thought about this and answered, “Because I had to. He was suffering, and his parents were suffering. Something needed to be done and I found a way to help. But it wasn’t hard. I didn’t sacrifice. And it was so little. There are such big things in the world that need help and I feel like it’s impossible.” My father put down his bread and took my hand, “You opened a whole world to him and his family. You gave him the whole world by your actions. It’s what we can all do. One person at a time. It’s what we’re meant to do, one action at a time. That’s how we help the world.” In 1971, after I graduated from college, after I moved to Maryland, and after I began my teaching career, Mrs. Schneider enrolled in adult education courses. A few years later she became an elementary school teacher specializing in students who needed to learn in an English as a second language class. Hirshie went on to become a bio-chemist and he has helped to bring life-saving vaccines, one shot at a time—one person at a time, into the world. 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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