Becoming a Teacher.

Becoming a Teacher, Part One.

I walked slowly up the sidewalk on Thursday morning, shivering with my parka on in the cold rain and biting wind. I was heading to an elementary school for my weekly tutoring session in a special needs math class. I was resentful that it was so cold this early in October, I was still sleepy from a poor night's sleep, and I was more than a little downhearted as I glanced up at the dreary sky.

I had to blink hard to fight back tears.

The fourth grade students in the class were happy to see me. That made me smile a little. The teacher asked me to work with a few students in another room, including one boy I had worked with every single week so far.

He was a frustration. He never sat still. He laughed at me. He threw his pencil. He ripped his paper. He crawled on the floor. He pestered his classmates. He didn't solve the problems. He just didn't care.

The other students with me knew how to do the problems. I told them to do the worksheet on their own, and ask me if they had questions. They finished the worksheet in five minutes. I turned to the boy. He was running around the room. "Come on over here." I said, "We're going to work on the white board."

I wrote the first problem on the board, and handed him the marker. He got quiet. He didn't know how to do the problem. He had no idea. No clue. He didn't even know what the problem was asking. He didn't know how to start. He just really didn't understand math. And he couldn't stay focused long enough to learn it.

Over the next hour, we worked together on ten problems. I drew pictures, I helped him count on his fingers, I made sound effects, I turned erasing the board between problems a game (countdown: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1!), I gave high fives, I told some jokes, I pushed him on, I pretended my hands were a scale and taught him that if he put the same number of markers in each hand they were still balanced (just like an equation). He listened intently. He was trying to learn.

I constantly fought the attention battle. He was distracted by the cobweb in the corner of the room, the sound of kids playing outside, even his own shoe. His gaze was constantly floating away from the numbers I had written so largely on the board directly in front of him. I picked up his hand and used his own pointer finger to touch each number as we said it out loud. I helped him count on his fingers when we added.

We worked intently, minute by minute. My mind was racing, searching for more ideas to teach him in a way that would help him, even a little.

He understood. HE UNDERSTOOD! He completed all ten problems, and he understood each one. We returned to the classroom. The rest of his classmates had already left. They finished in a matter of minutes, no doubt.

He handed in his paper. I told him I was SO proud of him and couldn't wait to see him next week. He smiled at me and left the room.

I put on my parka and walked out into the cold rain and bitter wind, but my heart was warm. It was so warm that I felt it radiating throughout every inch of my body, and I couldn't stop my entire face from beaming as I walked.

I had to blink hard to fight back tears.