My husband’s mother spent her career in the classroom. For more than four decades she was the lively presence at the front of the room, stewarding group after group of first graders through the hallmarks of that pivotal year: by the time they moved on, those children had grown into literacy. Over the years my mother-in-law assembled a wide collection of gifts from these little ones, the “#1 Teacher” plastic apples and the framed photos with mats covered by the wide scrawls of child signatures. As she readied finally for retirement, she began to thin her classroom supplies, and her grandchildren were the recipients of a career’s worth of materials.
There were books. In fact there were stacks and stacks of books — hardcover picture books with playful jackets, thin “Learning to Read” books with large fonts. In many she had written her name in the crisp handwriting of one who spends years communicating with six-year-olds. There were other supplies — holiday decorations, geometric magnets, alphabet-learning kits, hundreds of markers. All of it was purchased from her own pocketbook, and all for the purpose of bettering the experience she provided for forty years’ worth of children.
She was a good teacher who was a stalwart advocate for early childhood education, one who witnessed the detriment of disparate starts, one who stood patiently by the many children who never occupied the pole position. She read to the children and rhymed with the children and sang songs to them, repeating, celebrating, noticing.