Dear Small Teacher,
Small teachers come in many shapes and sizes, but the small I am referencing has nothing to do with stature. The small I am referencing is a relative term. In today’s culture the word "small" has a negative connotation, as if somehow small equates to little or insignificant.
If you don’t believe it, take a look at advertising. At every turn, we are encouraged to dream big, go big or go home, and always, always order the super-size anything. A professor in college once asked us to guess the number #1 goal of advertising. Most of us guessed selling a product, but he said it was to keep consumers in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction.
Makes sense. People who are content with themselves or their lives aren’t going to be chomping at the bit to fill their lives with a lot of stuff.
Conversely, most consumers want to move faster, so they can make a bigger impact, expand, grow, maximize potential.
We carry computers in our pockets and can access a song, a news snippet, or communicate with anyone in the world in under 10 seconds. I can’t help but wonder where sitting on Nanny’s sun-bleached, porch swing shelling peas and singing old hymns fits into any of this. And I am not talking about the trendy farmhouse, distressed porch swing that gives the illusion of tranquility. I am talking about the one with a rusty chain and creaky plywood that has withstood four decades of summer storms and even more tears.
Every single day we are moving at a break neck speed, so much so that when the pandemic caused a sudden halt to the rat race, the whiplash dang near killed us.
I still haven’t figured out if we are racing toward something or away from something, but I do know nothing makes a teacher feel smaller than an evening walk where she sees the stars for the first time in weeks and wonders about the brightest one in the far left corner of the vast, open sky.
Surely, it was there before she started her teaching career. It will be there after she leaves too. In light of the stars, we are not that important. We are only stars in our own minds and in the hearts of those who can see our reflections. But even then, we will still burn out, and maybe this idea that we need to dream big, live loud, and be something is nothing but a ruse.
Real stars, the ones that are faithful to show up in the sky every single night are magnificent works of art, and yet, most days they go unnoticed by the average person.
What makes us think we will be any different?
At the end of the day, I think we would be much better off if we stopped trying to get noticed and simply decided to slow down and shell peas with Nanny in her porch swing while we still can and maybe trust that small is not a synonym for insignificant.
Small is merely the acknowledgement that there is a big universe out there, and we are only a tiny piece of it.
It’s a liberating thought, isn’t it?
-CDB