Jamie’s visit lit something inside me I hadn’t felt in a while. Not hope — not yet. But warmth. A flicker. Like the pilot light in an old furnace that just needs a little coaxing to roar back.
The next day, I started a new habit.
Every Friday, I write one handwritten note to a student. Just a small slip of paper, nothing fancy:
“You asked a great question today.”
“You’ve improved a lot since September — I see it.”
“You have a voice worth hearing.”
At first, they looked confused. Suspicious, even. One boy asked, “Is this for a grade?”
But by the third week, something shifted.
They started staying after class. Started asking me what I read in college. One girl brought me a poem she wrote. Another told me she started journaling.
And slowly, without fanfare, my classroom became something again. A space. A shelter. A little pocket of stillness in their too-loud world.
I still don’t make enough money.
I still have backaches and heating bills and more state mandates than I can count.
But I also have a drawer full of student poems now.
A paper snowflake from Maria taped to my desk.
A voicemail from Jamie’s mother, thanking me for “seeing her boy when no one else did.”
No test score will ever measure that.
Last week, a substitute came in to cover my 4th period. She was young — couldn’t have been more than 25. I gave her the lesson plan, and as she looked over it, she said:
“You’ve been here a long time, haven’t you?”
I nodded. “Forty-three years.”
She smiled. “That’s amazing. I hope I can last that long.”
I looked at her — so bright, so eager, so much ahead of her — and I felt something I hadn’t felt in years.
Not tired. Not used up.
Proud.
We may be older. We may be invisible to some.
But we carry a thousand stories in our bones.
And if we’re lucky — really lucky — we pass on just one spark that lights someone else’s way.
That’s enough.
That’s still something.
That’s what it means to teach.
I may not be called “teacher” anymore… but I will always be one.
