Once upon a time, I was a teacher. On the first day of school, in what would end up being my last year of teaching, I was greeted by a big-eared, bright-eyed boy who bounded up to me Tigger-style and stated, “Hi! I’m in your class this year and I can’t read!” Huge grin.
I was standing on the playground, attendance roster in hand, calling out names in an attempt to gather the students in my third-grade class. It was a muggy, hot, August morning and already I could feel the sweat pooling on the back of my neck. “Well, I suppose we’ll need to do something about that this year,” I responded, smiling down at him. “Yep!” he hollered, and folded his arms across a torn and tattered notebook.
He clutched two chewed-up pencils in one hand; a beat-up backpack sat at his sneakered feet. When he grinned, which was often, his smile stretched across his face and seemed to rest on the sides of his prominent ears. His gaze followed my every move. Occasionally, he would guide me in the pronunciation of a classmate’s name or retrieve an errant pencil, but never did he let on about the courage that he harbored.
The second day of school, he smiled and dashed across the playground to join the kickball game. With one swift movement, he sent the ball sailing over the fence. His admiring cohorts cheered and high-fived him as he burst around the bases in a victorious recess dance. I rushed to retrieve yet another wayward ball from the street. When I returned, he stood inside the fence, hands clutching the steel links in the confident pose of a Nike ad.
“Ain’t I the best player you’ve ever seen?’ he asked triumphantly.
“Aren’t you the best player I’ve ever seen?” I corrected.
“Yep, I sure am!” he beamed. “Yes you are,” I laughed.
Less than a month later, I sat at my desk on a quiet morning, grading papers and awaiting the arrival of students. A piercing sound shattered the calm and ricocheted down the halls of the school. This same student exploded into the room, a mass of seething anger and relentless noise. His eyes were scrunched, his fists clenched and every bad word that he could summon erupted from his mouth. It took three adults to get him out of the room and calmed down.
Thirty minutes later, he entered the room again; his sheepish smile and bent head the only clues to the outburst of the morning.
That afternoon, the school counselor came to me and dropped a thick and menacing file on my desk. The boy’s name was written across the top. As I read the reports of abuse and neglect, of foster homes and failed adoptions, of broken bones and shattered lives and difficulties at school, I learned just what a 9-year-old could endure.
Together, we stomped on through that year, taking two steps forward and one step back as we both learned to deal with the effects that suffering renders on a child’s ability to learn.
On a bright morning in early April, my students are I were working on word problems in math. If a train leaves the station at nine o’clock and travels at 100 miles per hour, how old will you be when you finally answer this question? We plugged along until I finally paired students up to answer practice problems in the book. Page 110. Suddenly, this child’s hand is gyrating. He is shouting my name.
“Yes?” I say, a bit exasperated. I am tired. It has been a long year.
“I can read! I can read!” He is exuberant and shocked. “I! Read! That! Problem!” he states, his finger jabbing at the problem as if it had miraculously read itself to him. His smile is stretched wide. “I know how to read,” he shouts, ecstatic with the knowledge. “I know how to read,” he whispers, incredulous with the feat. And a room full of children, all of them wise to the bigness of this revelation, broke into spontaneous applause.
In the midst of suffering, we learned that nothing is impossible. In my last year of teaching, I witnessed a hero. Sometimes heroes are not borne from the carnage of mass shootings or from the efforts of million dollar ad campaigns. Sometimes heroes come in the form of little boys with tattered jeans, dirty faces, sad stories and smiles as big as the universe. Sometimes heroes teach you that suffering doesn’t mean a loss of joy or success.
I don’t know if this child ever realized his own courage; children rarely do. I will never forget it.
Siobhan Sprecace lives in Englewood. Colorado Voices is an annual column-writing contest.
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