I’m counting down the most memorable moments from my teaching career leading up to the one year anniversary of the day I moved on from my life as an educator.
This particular moment, or really, several moments actually don’t involve students. Actually, students were the catalyst, but they absolutely did not participate.
My experience as an educator was just as much about working with my colleagues as it was working with the students. Over the years there was a whole variety of co-workers that I spent my days with. For a five or six year stretch, there were two co-workers in particular that I bonded with the most.
Faith was my Battle of the Books co-coach. She and I also taught similar grade levels. Since I was Catholic and she wasn’t, I taught religion to my class and hers when I taught 3rd and 5th grades. In exchange, she taught social studies to both classes.
Tina was another teacher who was like me. For all the extra duties I was tasked with, all the committees, teams, etc. that I chaired and led, it wasn’t everything. What I didn’t lead and coordinate, she did. Some committees we were both on. I was nominated twice for the diocese’ Lewis Award–basically the Catholic school version of Teacher of the Year. She was nominated once and won.
What made these two ladies special was the “meetings” we had after school every month or so. They were never planned ahead of time. And certainly no agenda. Well…I mean, if you call appetizers and sangria an agenda, then I guess we had one.
The “meetings”, as we called them, were always initiated randomly by one of us who had a rough day or just needed a break. When there was a day like that, one of us would write a little note on a very teacher-y notepad. See example below:
The note had one simple question on it: Are you available for a meeting after school today? Whoever called the meeting would get a student to take the note to the other teachers with the instructions to wait for a response and then take it to the third person. In case of prying eyes, our answers were simple: yes or no. But it was never no.
Then, during dismissal, we would pick the place and agree on a time. Usually about 10-15 minutes after all the kids were picked up. Sometimes Tina would have to run home to let her dogs out before our “meeting”.
Our favorite place was a mom and pop Italian restaurant that was in the downtown area of our city, which was less than a mile from our school. We always sat near the back in case any students or parents happened to come in while we were sipping on adult beverages and bitching about whatever was going on at school at the time. It wasn’t always about school. Our personal lives always worked their way into conversation.
We’d each order a different appetizer and then share them around the table. Once the drinks were gone and the plates were empty, usually about an hour and a half to two hours, we’d go home, our hearts relieved of whatever stress had caused us to call the meeting. Frustration released. Because we were the only ones who really understood the environment we were working in.
The year after Tina won the Lewis Award (about a year after we came back from Covid), she moved to Virginia. At that point, Faith had already been gone for two or three years. She had moved back to Texas when her husband retired from the army.
While I haven’t talked to Tina in a few years, Faith was a reference for me when I was applying to jobs last summer. She knew all that I did at the school and I trusted her to be honest in her assessment of how hard I worked. It certainly helped in landing my current job.
I miss those “meetings” sometimes. It makes me smile when I think about the camaraderie I shared with those ladies. We were in the proverbial trenches together. And honestly, they are a big part of the reason I kept going and stayed for as long as I did. They made it seem…just not so bad, I guess. And until it really did get bad, ‘not so bad’ was really nice.
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