My second teaching job was at a small, rural, pre-K-12th grade school in Louisiana. I think almost 90% of the school population (teachers and students) were related by blood, and if not by blood then certainly by friendship. My students got many laughs at my dialect, phrases, and by calling me the Yankee teacher.
10 years ago I was a young teacher; in fact, my former students are the not the age I was when I was teaching them. It’s fun to see them getting married and having children of their own. At that time in my life I was a young, it was my first time teaching high school, and throughout the years with a little more experience and a little more maturity there are so many things I wish I would’ve done differently in my classroom. I really wanted my students to like me and that didn’t always serve them the best. I felt like I was in a position where I had to teach certain material even though I knew if that wasn’t necessarily what was going to serve them in their future lives. I wish I had had more real-life conversations with more of my students; although I think I tried my best to be an example of a different/outsider perspective of life and I appreciated the conversations I did have with them.
10 years ago two of our students were killed in a car crash. Trent and Evan “Pudge”. They had been at a party, were drinking, and crashed their car on the drive home. I think about this event all the time. The older student (a senior), Trent, I knew of and saw him at school, but I had not actually taught him. The younger student, Pudge, was a junior and his mother was a teacher at the school. Everybody knew these boys. The majority of the community spent their lives watching these boys since birth. At the funeral their school pictures were displayed and I couldn’t help but think that these were young men that had amazing futures ahead of them; but now as a mother, when I look back at their photos I think that those boys were babies.
10 years ago at lunch I held a teacher-student book club. We were discussing the book Thirteen Reasons Why, which was newer at the time. One of the discussion questions that we were mulling over was, “can you imagine what life would be like if you lost someone and you never got the chance to say goodbye?” In the novel a high school girl commits suicide and so a lot of our discussion was talking about high school community, friendship, and what it would be like if someone just wasn’t there anymore.
10 years ago in my junior English class I saw goodbye to my students, and told them to have fun at the party over the weekend and to be safe. I had heard of a big party that was happening over the weekend, no details, just that there was one…again small community, teenagers who like to talk about everything in class.
10 years ago after my junior English class I had had a discussion with Pudge about how he could bring his English grade up. I gave him some assignments to redo over the weekend. After school, as I was preparing my classroom for the weekend, I noticed that he had left his English book under his desk. I brought it down to his mom’s classroom and he happened to be there talking with her about where he was possibly going for dinner that evening. I just remember having this conversation with him and his mom, and putting my arm around his shoulders and joking with him about how he was going to bring up his grade but had left his English book behind. I don’t particularly think that Pudge liked me very much as a teacher. I like to think that there were moments he felt a connection and that I cared about him. I often think about many of the wonderful conversations about life we could have had and I regret that maybe I didn’t have as many of those conversations with him as I should have. He was smart, witty, intelligent, and definitely had an opinion on all subjects.
10 years ago I woke up and saw on my phone that I had many missed phone calls and text messages from my coworkers. When I called one of them back he gave me the news about what had happened. This moment and the weeks that followed just are etched in my brain. I had never lost someone I knew that I was so young. I remember the conversations I had with my students, I can picture some of his friends sitting in my classroom just crying, or being mad, I can see the hallway decorated, the boys who all got matching BDS tattoos, and watching as this moment in time unfolded in this tightknit community.
Their death occurred at a time in my life when Mason and I were trying to begin our own family and I remember thinking there’s so much you cannot protect your children from in this life. While I had always wanted to be a mom, this scenario seemed beyond my grasp of understanding. How a child could be taken away from their mother. Pudge’s mom, Martha, is one of the most amazing women I have had the pleasure to know. I didn’t know her extremely well, but watching her grieve the loss of her child and how she could remain faithful to God and to keep on living day after day after day amazes me.
I think about Martha and Pudge so much. To me she a pillar of a woman who I admire and her son is the student who I just loved, got frustrated with, but who taught me so much about what is really important as a teacher…it’s not always about the textbook.
Now that I’m a mom with three little boys of my own and I see my former students starting their families I can only imagine what his life would have looked like but I am so thankful that I had the opportunity to know him.
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