Sometimes when people hear that I teach middle school special education, they look a little shocked. They say something like, “Wow--How can you do that? That must be difficult.” It’s true, it is difficult; it is uniquely challenging. When I take the time to examine my vocation, I realize very clearly that, although it’s a strange world, it’s a world that fits me, a world that I love. It is a place where my heart breaks a little bit almost every day, and I am stronger for the breaking. The triumphs and challenges of teaching, especially teaching adolescents, especially teaching adolescents with different learning needs, strengthen my heart and my spirit.
In his excellent book, Healing the heart of democracy: The courage to create a politics worthy of the human spirit, Parker Palmer explains:
“Everyday life is a school of the spirit that offers us chance after chance to practice dealing with heartbreak. Those chances come when we aspire and fail or hope and have our hopes dashed or love and suffer love’s loss. If we are able to enter into and consciously engage hard experiences of this sort, our hearts will get the kind of exercise that can make them supple. But if we try to shield ourselves against life’s teachable moments, our hearts--like any unexercised muscle--become more vulnerable to stress.
Under stress, an unexercised heart will explode in frustration or fury. If the situation is especially tense, that exploding heart may be hurled like a fragment grenade toward the source of its pain. But a heart that has been consistently exercised through conscious engagement with suffering is more likely to break open instead of apart. Such a heart has learned how to flex to hold tension in a way that expands its capacity for both suffering and joy.” (Palmer, 2011, p. 60)
I know something about hearts breaking open. I teach children reading and writing who have specific learning disabilities in the areas of reading and writing. They are smart, very smart (some of them much smarter than I am), but reading and writing is difficult for them. They do not learn best through reading. They do not show their incredible intelligence through their writing. My students show up to school every day to do something that does not come easily to them, and they have to do it ALL day long. They learn, they strengthen, and they improve, but it will never be as easy for them as it is for some other people (like me). Their courage breaks my heart.
I teach them literature, stories about people whose hearts broke open through love, through tragedy, through genocide, through grief and horror. We talk about how a person builds character, about the damage done by prejudice and stereotypes, about the importance of individual decisions, about the nature of being human, about the crazy things that love drives people to do. They impress me every day with their insights and their understanding. They are wise beyond their years.
The day of a middle school student is a long string of teachable moments; I am privileged to witness them. They gain and lose their first real friends. They fall in “love” (we, as adults may not believe it is love at the age of 12, but I assure you that THEY do). They lose interest. They find new interests. They challenge themselves. They give up. They try again. Everything is brand new to them. Everything is old and boring. They know it all. They know nothing. They are delightful and devilish. And, they are damn difficult to handle sometimes. Teaching my students sometimes causes my hopes to soar and sometimes dashes my hopes on the rocks below.
I teach because it’s difficult and I need the difficulty. I teach because it breaks my heart open again and again, and I am stronger for it. I cry often, as a special ed teacher. I cry for the student who can’t handle one more assignment right now, even though he desperately wants to succeed. I cry for the student whose best part of the day is coming to school, who has no real home to return to at night. I cry for the family who is overwhelmed by the needs of their child. I cry for the student with whom I tried to hard to build a relationship who got himself in big trouble from a careless mistake. I cry, and then I dry my eyes and I go back to work. Because, I am a teacher and my heart is getting stronger every day.
