It must have been a grey, cloudy day when the door to my office creaked open and one of my bright-eyed colleagues peered in with a smile that told me something special was afoot. It must have been a grey day because every day in Prague is grey in October.
In October, in Prague and in classrooms around the globe, we celebrate World Teachers’ Day, and on that cozy afternoon when I was teaching in an elementary school in Braník, a suburb of the city, my colleague had come to tell me I had won an award as the most likable teacher.
It must have been a grey, cloudy day when the door to my office creaked open and one of my bright-eyed colleagues peered in with a smile that told me something special was afoot. It must have been a grey day because every day in Prague is grey in October.
In October, in Prague and in classrooms around the globe, we celebrate World Teachers’ Day, and on that cozy afternoon when I was teaching in an elementary school in Braník, a suburb of the city, my colleague had come to tell me I had won an award as the most likable teacher.
As she handed me a homemade ribboned badge that read in Czech “Most Likeable Teacher,” my officemate gave me a wide smile and a knowing wink.
“You have earned that,” she said.
Granted, I did want to be liked.
I have wanted to be liked for as long as I can remember and my insatiable need for personal affirmation from pretty much any living human being has caused more than one problem for me in my professional and personal life. I am still working on it.
But, because I know how much I loved the teachers I liked in school, I definitely wanted to be liked as a teacher.
It was not hard to endear myself to the kids at the school in Prague – it helped that I was the only American. I started out by learning a few words in Czech. I could say, “hello,” “goodbye” and “cucumber.”
My first day of school, I called a fourth grader a cucumber in front of the whole class and it stuck. Every student in every grade for the next two years was a cucumber. And they loved it. Other teachers began referring to my students as my cucumbers. I would run into parents on the bus or in the salon and they would say, “Aha, you are the cucumber teacher.”
I was the teacher who let the entire ninth grade class play ping-pong when I was subbing their math lesson (and that is when I learned how to say “irresponsible” in Czech) and traumatized at least two dozen 13-year-olds out of every participating in a spelling bee ever again. (To console themselves, they took the Beatles’ “Let it be” and changed it to “Spelling Bee,” swaying back and forth in commiseration and solidarity as they sang it up and down the corridors of school.)
Some of my students started drawing ninjas on their tests, captioned: “This ninja will protect me from a bad grade.” I would draw cute kittens to distract the ninjas and then hand out the appropriate marks.
I ate lunch with my students.
We had fun.
But I was also the teacher with the loudest class, the teacher who lost a student on the metro during a field trip (we found him eventually), the teacher who could never seem to get her students to sit still and pay attention.
I had begun to realize that being the “likeable” teacher does not necessarily make one the “best” teacher, a lesson I re-learned over and over as I had to break up fist fights or mediate classroom disputes. The day I had to send half my sixth graders home with notes to their parents was especially difficult. No one wanted me to eat lunch with them that day. I hid away at the teacher’s table instead, and the other teachers rolled their eyes and chuckled when I explained what had happened. They knew these students, knew their antics – they were all second mothers to these children.
“Don’t worry,” Monika said to me. “It’s good for them. They will be better tomorrow.”
And they were better. A little discipline went a very long way.
Still, I managed to keep myself on a teacher high-horse. I was the cool teacher, after all, a veritable celebrity at this little school. And I was changing lives, I assumed, as an influential teacher.
And then one day, at the end of my second year, I had one very big learning moment.
I ran into my other officemate, the Spanish teacher, in the hall. He blew past me grumpily. He was always in a tizzy. When I tried to teach my students the word “moody,” they all laughed and said his name. He has a reputation.
“What’s his problem?” I asked our other officemate. She gave me a sour look.
“Little Dragon got ‘fired from class’ today,” she said. Inwardly I laughed. One of my favorite students was a wiry boy we affectionately called “Little Dragon” because he would curl all his limbs into a ball on his chair and hiss and snap at people who tried to talk to him – I loved that kid. He was a bit of a spit-fire, but he was open-hearted and kind when you catch him in the right moment. And it is not hard to upset the Spanish teacher. I wondered what rascally nonsense he must have pulled to get Professor Moody so upset.
I always try to be supportive of the other teachers in school in front of the students and my colleagues, so I kept my mouth shut, but when I ran into Little Dragon in the hallway I nodded to him.
“I heard you got kicked out of class.”
He blushed and hung his head. I was surprised by his unusual lack of perk and pride.
“Hey, whatever,” I told him and stuck out my hand for a low-five which he gave reluctantly.
Somewhere much nearer to the surface than I realized, my inner teacher was already shaking her head and giving me a disapproving glance. Do not undermine the discipline of other teachers. Do not encourage bad behavior. Whose approval are you looking for anyway? Is this your effort to be a ‘cool teacher?’
I brushed the thoughts away, much the way my sixth graders ignore my chiding, and strutted back to the office.
The Spanish teacher was back and clearly riled up. Something seemed off about the way he was carrying on. A genuine sense of disturbance hung in the air and my other officemate was nodding her head affirmingly.
My gut twisted.
“What did Little Dragon get in trouble for, anyway?” I asked when things had quieted.
“He was making fun of other students in class,” she answered. “You know how he is. Sometimes he can be a bully. But he seemed very humbled by it when he sat in the back of my class for the rest of the period. I hope he’s taking the lesson to heart.”
I wanted to die. I have never felt so sick, so foolish and so incredibly selfish in my entire life.
When the office emptied out I slipped onto the floor, stretched out lengthwise, and groaned miserably. “I am not mature enough to do this job,” I though. “They should not let me be a teacher.”
The bell rang and I realized I had another class to teach.
If I am proud of anything I did that day, it was getting through that class without showing a trace of my inner frustrations and anxieties. You have to leave your baggage at the door when you step inside a classroom.
But it was not necessarily a happy hour. My usual jovialness was replaced with an involuntary sobriety and every time I cracked a smile I wondered if I was being ‘too loose.’
As soon as class finished, I went in search of Little Dragon. Ten minutes and several floors of the school scoured and he was nowhere to be seen.
Without much of a stomach, I took my free hour to grab lunch while the rest of the school plunged into fifth period.
The cafeteria was almost empty, save a few wiggling third graders and two of my favorite teachers, Monika and Hanka. I pulled up a seat next to them and ate quietly while they chatted.
It was Monika who noticed I was upset. In my search for Martin, she had asked if everything was alright and I had insisted it was (because I was learning to fight the urge to burst into tears and complain about how hard this job can be every time someone asks). She gave me a look when I sat down, but did not say anything. It was the kiss she planted on the top of my head and the squeeze she gave my shoulders as she cleared her things to go that made me spill.
Gingerly, I stumbled through the explanation in Czech.
“I’m learning how to be a real teacher this week,” I said. “I’m learning that you can’t always be nice. It’s hard.”
Small words, big meanings. They had been there before.
“It’s hard to find the balance between being a strict teacher and an easy teacher,” said Hanka, the oldest of the English instructors at school who not only helped me get this position, but has had a cup of coffee ready for me in her office for every bump along this road. She is my fairy godmother.
“Students see you as a friend, as someone to play with, so of course your lessons will be noisy. And you do need discipline.”
I nodded, fully and painfully aware of this fact.
“But,” she says, her soft eyes drawing mine away from the half-eaten dumplings in beef and pickle sauce. “Teachers who shout and scream at their students may be worse. What are they teaching their children but that it’s okay to be angry and to yell? I hear those teachers when I’m in the hallway and it makes me sad.”
She gives her short, golden-brown hair an absent-minded pat and looks out the window before turning back to me.
“Mary, we have a Czech proverb: Every coin has two sides.”
The words are no sooner off her lips than I am back in time, two years ago to the day I first met her. It had been another crazy day – getting lost, missing appointments, stumbling over my non-existent Czech again and again. I had been close to tears when we had finally met up in her garden near the school to go over the year’s lesson plans. And when she dropped me off at the bus stop with a bag of fresh peaches, fresh eggs and fresh confidence, she had said the same thing. Every coin has two sides.
“You may have messy classes,” Hanka was saying, back in the school cafeteria in the grey light of April’s most awful Friday ever. “But, when you are good to your students, your kindness will stay in their minds and their souls. They will learn so much more from you because of your heart. We can’t go into our classrooms and be someone we’re not. Be yourself. Be kind.”
Hanka and I cleared our trays and followed Monika out of the cafeteria. I needed to find Little Dragon.
When fifth period let out, I tracked the ninth graders up to the third floor where they were waiting for Chemistry.
Turns out, he had been spending his free periods hiding in the bathroom. When the guys finally divulged his hiding place, I could see him sitting on the window ledge at the end of the row of sinks. I stood in the doorway and made eye-contact, but he was uncharacteristically quiet. Even his cronies looked a little down in the mouth.
I folded my arms uncomfortably. He just stared back at me.
“Come on in,” invited one of the boys.
“I can’t come in,” I said from the door. “This is the boys’ bathroom.”
“So? You’re a teacher,” they said. “You’re allowed to come in. It’s not advised, but you’re totally allowed to.”
I highlydoubted the validity of this argument, but the minutes on the clock were ticking and I had to talk to him before he left for the weekend.
With a deep breath, I stepped into the pale blue room and walked quickly past the sinks to the window where the boys were hovering around Martin who looked more dejected than I have ever seen a teenage boy.
“I need to apologize,” I said. He looked confused.
Thankfully, his English is pretty spot on, so I didn’t bother trying to fumble through anything in Czech. “I didn’t know the circumstances that got you ‘fired from class’ and I shouldn’t have goaded you the way I did. You were in the middle of learning an important lesson and I didn’t behave like a good teacher. Will you forgive me?”
Puzzlement and resistance ran mixed across his face and I could not tell if he understood how badly I felt. He was most likely dwelling in his own shame and regret, so that made two of us.
Maybe at least this time I was setting an example of how to own up to one’s faults?
“It’s nothing,” he told me. “It’s fine.”
I nodded.
“Okay.”
Then I turned to leave.
I wanted to be a good teacher and a kind teacher. I wanted to be genuine and open. But I also wanted to be a teacher that students could trust to do the right thing, to be fair, to be just and to give them an example of good character.
But that is not just the teacher I wanted to be. I want to be that kind of person.
The “Most Likeable Teacher” award is still something I recall fondly, but that humiliating day in the boys bathroom in a tiny school on the outskirts of Prague will live in my memory forever. I think that was the day I grew up.
The homemade ribbon has long-since been lost in some stowed-away box, but the lesson is still fresh in my mind.
Our teachers, our heroes, the leaders in our communities are all humans, all in the process of growing up, no matter how old or experienced. We want them to be likeable, but we need them to be changeable. We need them to be introspective and self-aware. We need them to always be rising to do better, and hopefully we can do the same. Hopefully we can all recognize where we fall short and decide it is time to change.
And thank goodness for teachers who set the example and help lead the way.
