Why I’m Thankful for Public Education
Meet 12 creative writing students who changed everything for me.
The 4-H champion who wrote mysteries just as skillfully as he raised goats.
The Hispanic girl who created spoken-word poetry about her heritage and found eager admirers in her classmates.
The star athlete who appreciated a place to escape stopwatches, drills, and the ominous twang of a fraying hamstring.
The valedictorian who was learning how to thrive outside the scientific formulas she’d always embraced.
The German exchange student who knew that originality was the same in any language.
The senior who had already mentally checked out, but little by little, quietly, was checking back in, in spite of himself.
The girl with special needs who took the class so she could dream, overriding everything her IEP described.
The recovering addict who handed me pages of soul-wrenching free-writes like the sacred artifacts they were.
The “band nerd” whose easy laughter reflected the culture she had internalized as she hummed and paced and conducted an unseen orchestra.
The boy with autism who shimmied with happiness as he commanded worlds that his imagination created.
The student taking four AP classes who rediscovered wonderment.
The new student whose lilting voice and strumming guitar hands enchanted his classmates just as much as did his panoramic smile and fluttery writing style.
Then came that Friday, a day of open sharing. It started when #12 began to sing and play, and #9 sprung up to do her thing. Soon #2, #5, and #11 chimed in, and #6 began to bob his head, just a little, while #8 rose to sway gently next to #10 whose imagination ignited. Then, soon, it was all of them, every single one:
The student who was in love for the first time, had a peer of the same skin color in class for the first time, earned a B for the first time, lost a family member for the first time, had a blind teacher for the first time …
The bold/sad/graceful students, the struggling/silly/sheltered students, the daring/curious/quiet students …
All of them. They sang, and they danced, and they forgot themselves, and in doing so, they exemplified the terribly complex and tremendously wonderful beauty of public education.
Where else could such joy exist NOT as a one-size-fits-all, monochromatic canvas, but instead, as a vibrant, multi-dimensional mosaic that I will never ever forget? Only in public education.
For these big moments and the small ones, for the privilege of being an educator who witnesses these moments, for the absolute right of ALL students to have these moments, I am—and always will be—thankful for public education.
Kathy Nimmer can be reached at www.KathyNimmer.com. She wrote this for Our Public Schools Work.