Dots

 There are six boxes on his piece of paper, drawings of arrows pointing from one to another. His number 2 pencil with a worn out eraser is moving steadily across the page. He is drawing ninety dots. 

I stop and look. I was on my way to my desk, but I notice him there, head bent, eyes straight ahead, his mouth moving silently as he counts to himself. 

I kneel beside his desk and I look at him, those brown eyes staring at me above his light blue mask. He’s got on that black Puma hoodie I’ve never seen him without. “Can you tell me about what you are doing?” I ask. 

But I already know. 

He is working on a math problem. “There are 6 classes and each class collects 90 cans. How many cans do the classes collect in all?” He drew six boxes to represent the classes. He is filling each box with ninety dots to represent the cans. He is sitting there, undistracted, undefeated, determined to draw five-hundred-forty dots and then count each one so that he can get the question right. So that he can feel like he is enough. So that he can show himself he can do it.

It’s a test but I don’t care. I show him how to add ninety six times.

I hand out a Scholastic magazine to my students and ask them to look through it independently at their desks. I tell them that, after fifteen minutes, we are going to all sit together on the rug and share what we found interesting with each other.

I sit at my desk to try to knock out my list of things to do before I head home today. I need to write my weekly newsletter for my parents and I have assignments I haven’t graded from earlier this week and I haven’t responded to anything my online kids have done yet today and I need to try to leave early because I have company coming tomorrow and I have to meet with my mentor teacher at 4 and she comes up to me with tears in her eyes and asks, “Um, Ms. Seals, do we have to share with the class?”

“I just want you to share something you find interesting,” I reply. 

Tears come. “I don’t know how to read stuff like this,” she says.

She’s the one who insists that she’s stupid because she doesn’t know how to spell. She’s the one who cries when I move on to a new subject and she hasn’t gotten her work done. She’s the one who thinks her ability to read defines her intelligence, determines her worth.

I close my computer. I put aside all the things I need to do. They’re not important anymore.

“Do you want me to read with you?” I ask. 

Sometimes I don’t know if I made the right call becoming a teacher but these are the moments I know I did. These are the moments I was made for, the moments that take the air out of my lungs. These are the moments I must keep myself from grabbing the kids by their shoulders and screaming at the top of my lungs, “I DON’T CARE WHAT GRADE YOU GET. A LETTER COULD NEVER DEFINE YOU. YOU ARE PRECIOUS AND WORTHY AND ENOUGH.” 

I’m not going to pretend I know what I’m doing, because I spend well over half the time feeling like I am absolutely drowning and doing nothing right at all. But I know that no kid who enters my classroom will believe their level of understanding defines their worth. No kid will fear that a mistake is anything more than an opportunity to grow. And if my kids walk into my classroom and know they are loved, I believe I have taught them the greatest lesson of all. 

Your eyes are looking forward. You aren’t giving up. You know how to get there and you’re well on your way. You’re the strongest one in the room as you draw your dots and in my book, you’ve already got it right.