The First Thing He Did Was Point Out The Classroom Cootie Detector

Dear Mr. K,

It was so wonderful to hear from you on my birthday. Facebook's pretty great like that sometimes. It's giving me the chance to tell you something I've wanted to say for twenty years.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You are so much magic, in human form. Did you know that? Everything you've done matters. I came into your classroom a scared shell of a kid with her defenses on high, and I left ready to take on the world. Or at least sixth grade.

Do you remember how you read to us?

You made time for us to sit on the rug and be read to, years after we stopped having story time at the library. You read to us on Friday afternoons, when our attention for the week had vanished. You read to us on Monday mornings when we needed extra time to turn our brains on. You treated us like we were worthy of being children in a world so anxious for us to grow up.

In one year, you read Maniac McGee aloud and taught a group of largely white fifth graders more about segregation than any textbook. You also read us Wayside School is Falling Down, and you never minded that I recited half the lines aloud with you, and shushed my glaring classmates.

You read us the House of Dies Drear, which I only remembered years later, when I saw it on a library shelf and picked it up again. I couldn't remember a thing about it except that you read it to us, which was enough to make me want to read it again. I'm glad I did.

You loved American history - its themes, its lessons, its mythology - and you were utterly unafraid of its darkness. When you taught about slavery in the US, you cried in front of us - a grownup! You trusted us enough to help us understand the pain, and we did. You used history to help us write the story of ourselves - the people we wanted to be in this world.

You told us your smoke detector picked up cooties, and ended a two-year plague in one sentence. Everything. you. did. mattered.

*

It's true about the cootie detector. I came into fifth grade on the heels of two straight years of cootie-related bullying. I was not looking forward to a third. Mr. K's first official action as our fifth-grade teacher was to point to the smoke detector and announce, in a grave tone, that the class Cootie Detector had gone silent, which meant that we were all immune from accusations of cooties. (Did he hear about it from our prior teachers? Was it simply something he did for everyone? No one knew. We'll never know.)

What a way to kick it off. Nobody questioned him about it. Nobody dared. I never heard the word cootie again.

You want to talk about how to make kids feel safe in a classroom? He was the master. Every kid in class got a nickname by the end of the first month. He stood by his classroom door and shook our hands or offered high-fives on our way out. He never made a kid ask permission to use the bathroom; for the first time in most of our lives, we were simply trusted to go when we needed to and come back quickly.

But nobody talks about feeling safe.

Everyone talks about the jokes. Everyone talks about the funny voices, the stories with punchlines, the secret in-jokes he built with us over our year in fifth grade. I was twenty-five and teaching my own students when I figured out what made them work so well.

*

I don't know if you know this, but you taught me one of the most important things I know about teaching middle school kids - it's one of the things that makes parents think I'm magic.

You taught me how to include each kid in the class by appearing to make fun of them, but by actually flipping the punchline back on myself. I can't explain it much better than that, but I know I learned it from you, because your class was the first time in my life that I felt in on the joke with everybody else.

*

He thanked me for those letters. Said I reminded him why he loved teaching.

His family members keep saying that heaven just got a lot funnier, and I've no doubt they're right.

But though I'm sure most of his students remember the ways in which we laughed in his class, his jokes and silly stories, I hope, too, that they remember the way he gave us nicknames. I hope they remember feeling seen and valued. I hope they remember all the ways, big and small, that he made us feel like we belonged and mattered, years after we left his classroom.

That's his legacy.

May we all make safe harbors of the places where we reign, and welcome warmly the ones who need us most - with a joke, a nickname, and a story or two.

Rest well, Mr. K. I'm so glad we got to have you.