Whenever anyone asks what I do--the perfunctory small talk at any party--I’m a little wary.  I state it like a challenge, daring them to think it’s cute, or say, “You must love kids!” or picture me in a denim jumper with apples and a school bus appliqued in contrasting thread on the front bib, or wearing a wooden necklace with my last name spelled out in brightly colored beads.

It’s not that I’m not proud of what I do, it’s just that I don’t want them to think I’m “that” type of teacher.   

I’m just not the kind of teacher I see at the teacher supply store every August, piling posters of multicolored children with white features holding hands around the globe into their baskets, on top of the rainbow borders and workbooks that feature cartoon characters-- all in easily duplicatable black line drawings, teaching the use of the exclamation point.  

I’m standing in line behind that teacher, in jeans and Tevas and whatever color t-shirt I pulled on that morning, holding one book, probably one with a solid cover--no pictures or illustrations here--and a title that contains either “theory” or “pedagogy”--books of dense text, found only on the bottom shelves, hidden away behind more brightly colored covers boasting, “100 Fun Activities For All Ages!”  

When you walk into my classroom, you won’t see neat rows of desks, topped with preprinted nametags in teacher’s best cursive, outlined in stars or puppies or apples.  There’s no cute sign with ' welcome' printed in 15 languages, and you will never see a poster of a fluffy white kitten with only his front paws on a shelf, looking over his cat-shoulder with startled eyes and a caption that reads, “Hang in there!”  There are no hamsters running in wheels in cages by the window, and the paper in my room is not laminated into stiff, shiny perfection.  

My classroom is much more disorderly. Bookshelves dominate the room, filled with mismatched plastic containers of picture books in various sizes, their bold titles and bright pictures sticking out the top. There are shelves of chapter books: everything from old favorites to new series to books I owned and loved when I was a child, spines now bent into an arch from repeated readings.  If you look closely, you will spot some distinctly unlaminated books, written and illustrated by my students, their clumsy drawings and imperfect spelling set off by improvised bindings of yarn pulled through punched holes and tied in the messy knots that pass for eight-year-olds’ bows.  

At the beginning of the year, my walls are almost bare. They reveal the strange oatmeal- covered bulletin-board walls so typical of the portables that have become staples of the schools all over California , that have grown faster than the building funds, and are only covered in a few, handwritten posters made of the same yellowy material as file folders.  As the year continues, student work goes up, but it’s not mounted individually on colored paper and laminated.  When I’m feeling really ambitious, I put some colored paper up first; otherwise I staple it right to the wall.  

The only classroom pets I ever had were some caterpillars, which emerged from their crystallites one weekend when I’d neglected to put the sugar water they feed on into the fake cardboard flower that came with the kit. On Monday morning my first graders discovered shriveled butterfly bodies, the wings never having opened up, still crumpled on their backs.  I led my first graders in a funeral for them, where we buried the small bodies in the sandy dirt of the schoolyard, marked the grave with some small gray stones, and recited the butterfly poem we’d written.  

My lesson plan book looks nothing like the models, with objectives and plans carefully written out.  I’d like to say I’m a natural who doesn’t need such detailed planning, but I probably should do it. It's not uncommon for me to start an activity, realizing that I know exactly what I want to get to but not really having thought out exactly how to do it.  I carry most of my plans in my head, with only a few penciled words, arrows and symbols as a written clue on the grid that divides each week into days and subjects to the plan in my mind.  

I don’t teach because I like children.  To tell the truth, I’m not that fond of them.  Not in that “aren’t you adorable/you’ve grown so much over the summer/I could just eat you up” way of great aunts who pinch your cheeks or the teachers with the jumpers. I like kids’ minds.  The way Oscar will suddenly look up at me and say, “Oh, that’s just like when my little brother broke a vase and my mom blamed me” in response to a book, or Melissa will shout out, “That’s an invasion of privacy!” when Gilberto suggests a weekly desk check to make sure everything’s neat.  

I love looking at heads crouched over their desks, writing furiously, so caught up in their ideas that my weaving through the room, spying over shoulders clad in tee-shirts and Giants jerseys, doesn’t interrupt the progress of the yellow, number 2 pencils across the lined pages of their notebooks.  

I love Luz’s journal entry, three pages reading in Spanish, “I hate Jeannie because she got mad at me and I was only trying to help and she’s a mean teacher and I hate her” over and over again. Letters so irregular they look like a ransom note cut from newspaper headlines and spellings only a teacher could decipher-- vowels missing and not a space to be found-- and Luz, discovering that what she was too mad to talk about she can write, and then we can talk, and she’s made herself heard in a world that doesn’t pay much attention to the protests of a chubby, eight-year-old Latina girl.  I could never put red ink on these pages.  

I want to say that I succeed in all of this, that every day my classroom is filled with joyous awakenings, but I have to report that’s not the case.  Most days, most weeks, we do our work like millions of others do their work every day, plodding along.  Some days I sit with Josefa for the 38th consecutive school day, while everyone else in the class reads quietly, magnetic letters in fluorescent yellow, orange, red, green in front of me on a white metal burner cover that serves as an improvised board. Giving her instructions to manipulate those letters, I pray that today she’ll be able to run her finger under each letter and make its sound, that she'll put them together into the right order to make a word. Then she continues to reverse sounds and say “es” instead of “se” as she peers up through the smooth, black curtain of hair she’s taken to draping in front of her face since she discovered that everyone else in the class was reading and she still couldn’t, hoping it will hide her from my disappointment. Both of us know tomorrow we’ll be at it again, maybe this time with alphabet blocks or a pencil and paper or a piece of sand paper for the tactile advantage.  

But the handful of times when I see a spark in a students’ eyes that reveals she’s imagining a whole new world for herself-- that’s the kind of teacher I want to be.  

My students, with their skins varying from alabaster to toasty to the color of baking chocolate, are poor.  They’re not meant to succeed but set up to fail in underfunded schools with desks that never all match, classroom libraries that consist of a few Bobbsey Twins books with the pages falling out-- unless supplemented by their teacher-- and the promise of Internet connections sometime in the next year, for the third year in a row.  The copier at their school breaks down daily, and the 1500 copies each teacher is allotted per month are never enough anyway.   

I used to think a revolution was necessary to change all this, and I still do.  But I thought that revolution involved guns and overthrown governments and was colored grey.  

But then Reyes, arrived from Mexico at eight with no formal schooling, writes me a note to say he went outside to play, and that’s a revolution. Because Reyes, if he has the skills and the voice, will demand what he needs in this world, housing and food and fair wages, just like he lets me know what he’s done today. Like Luz lets me know in her journal why she’s upset.  Whenever new possibilities appear for Reyes, Luz, Huy, and millions of unique children like them all over the country, something political has happened.  When the kids who were set up to fail deny the expectations placed on them and rise like kites in a wind to survey the land around them, that’s revolution.  

In Mexico last summer, I saw the Diego Rivera murals at the Department of Education.  Painted on one wall is a teacher holding an open book.  Assorted men and women of various ages sit in a circle around her, a tattered soldier on a horse, holding a rifle and ammunition slung across his chest nearby.  The land is yellow and brown; these are farmers, and indigenous people, evidenced by their wide sombreros, long, dark braids and overalls.  They are learning to read.  It is part of a series on revolution.  As I looked at the mural, staring as suited men and women who worked in the government offices around me walked past, the tears in my eyes caused my vision to blur.  That is what teaching means to me.  That’s what I want the person at the party to understand when I take a deep breath, tilt my chin up just a little, and say, “I’m a teacher.”

Author's Biography

Jeannie Bruland lives in Oakland, California.  She has taught students from kindergarten to seventh grade, and currently teaches kindergarten, first, and seventh grade Spanish. She also works with student teachers at Mills Colleges.   

Besides teaching, Jeannie enjoys writing and various arts and crafts. She has recently begun knitting a scarf. 

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