Elementary school teachers (May 20, 2023)

When I was in third grade, my homeroom teacher was… not very inspiring. My mom insists that, whereas I seemed to have learned a lot in second and fourth grade, it wasn’t necessarily clear that I was enriched going to third grade. Part of this I can verify. The main memory I have of third grade is my friend and I sitting in the back of the classroom doing the next day or next week’s math homework, since class must have been sufficiently boring, and the lesson plans sufficiently easy (??). We also did a couple other antics, like come up with our own code language pooling together our small vocabulary of broken words of Vietnamese (we both had Vietnamese blood but neither of us spoke a word) to make jokes about the class; or draw comic strips and sell them during recess for $0.10; or effectively pass notes during class, but because we sat next to each other, we didn’t have to physically pass the paper and just shared a line sheet of paper between us and formatted it as an “Instant Messaging” chatroom. These are not antics disruptive to the class, just symptoms of bored students. I think our IM paper got confiscated by our homeroom teacher once, but she didn’t even make us read it aloud to the class, probably because the contents were so boring, or (to exaggerate this story) maybe said “I’m bored.”

By contrast, my second and fourth grade teacher seem to have been much more invested in my learning. Now granted, these were the kind of teachers who can be credited as, wow, totally responsible for sowing the seeds of my success and who I am today. My second grade teacher was a little bit intense, but because she cared about her students so much. I was a very shy student in second grade. She built up some of my confidence by telling me that I have the trappings of a “silent leader”, and coupled it with some tough love (constructive criticism) by telling me that I needed to raise my hand in class more. “Participate” was the magic word. Ooh, I can still feel the sacredness from hearing her say that word, and my mom repeating that word after the teacher-parent conference (I cried in the middle of the teacher-parent conference). In retrospect, I’m not sure whether “silent leader” is even a real thing, or if that’s just a thing a second grade teacher would say to a kid because second grade teachers are excellent at inventing magical words for everything. I really took it to heart nonetheless.