Dear Teacher with the Straws,
This past week I attended my son's kindergarten awards program at Jim Allen Elementary. Like most parents on awards day, I was feeling a twinge of nostalgia mixed with sadness and pride. It's a cocktail that can do a number on any parent. Don't believe it? Find a mother of a senior graduating from high school on aisle 9 at Publix, ask her how she feels about this milestone, and watch her turn into a watery mess that has to be mopped up like a soda spill. I'm not sure what makes these milestones so hard for us Mommas, but they are..... so, so, hard. I have one son leaving kindergarten and another leaving elementary school. In reflecting upon these transitions, I am asking myself the same question mommas have been asking themselves since cavemen were carving into stone. I can't read any of those ancient symbols, but I am almost positive one of them says, "Where did the time go?" While sitting at the awards day, I figured out the answer to this age-old question. I know you're dying to know, so I'll go ahead and tell you. The time went in the straws. I discovered the answer from my son's teacher, who has been teaching kindergarten for 23 years...yes, 23 years and still loves it. Listen, if a woman has taught kindergarten for 23 years and offers me some advice, you can dang sure bet, I'm gonna take it. But here's the thing, like all good teachers, she didn't come right out and give me advice or show me the answer. I just watched her closely and figured it out myself. See, in her room, learning is readily apparent, even down to the way they count the days of school. Their awards day was on the 177th day of school. Each day of school gets a straw. When they reach 10 straws, they bundle the straws and move it to the tenth's place. When they get ten bundles, they create a larger bundle and move it to the hundredth's place. There were only three straws left for the entire school year. Honestly, I don't know what came over me in that moment, but I felt like if I didn't get out of that room pretty quickly I was going to need to be mopped up like the soda spill on aisle 9. I think it was because I began to see every single straw as an individual day that added up to a lengthy school year and an even longer life. I could see clearly a straw of a Halloween costume gone awry, a scraped knee that wouldn't stop bleeding, a silly props picture over in May and all the days in between that meant nothing and everything at the same time.
Then, I imagined the stacks and stacks of straws that would have added up to twenty-three years of teaching, and all the families and lives that would have been made stronger and better and wiser from the influence of one teacher. Did each school year get its own big bundle? And then a bigger question. How many bundles would this Momma have on this earth or with each of her boys? I have no idea what prompted Mrs. Helton to pick straws for this counting task. My guess is that they are relatively cheap but still easy enough to see, as is the case with each day of our lives. ​ Each day seems flimsy, cheap, and relatively insignificant, until you add them all up and see how big of an impact they make collectively. I want to use my straw each day to sip up the sweetest moments of life and pour those moments right back into each person I meet along the way.
Because one day I know I will have to answer an important question: What did you do with your bundle?
-CDB