Teacher Appreciation

It's Teacher Appreciation Week, and while I've been working all week on a light-hearted appreciation message to tell you all how important and valued you are right now, I was struggling to connect real meaning to it. My message changed this week as I, like many of you, learned about the sad case surrounding the death of Ahmaud Arbery. If you haven't learned about this story, you certainly owe it to yourself to learn more. While the events that occurred in Georgia on February 23rd speak strongly of the state of our society, I heard a story of education. It's a story that reminded me of myself and how different my life could have been as well.

I grew up like so many other white males in the South. I had two parents with decent jobs that put us in a place that in a rural area, you could call the middle class. We ate, paid our bills, and lived in a home, but also never had a lot of money for extras. Coming from a working-class family in the South, you are not often surrounded by college-educated people. Instead, you are surrounded by people that have worked hard but also often come with pre-conceived notions that were handed down in their homes and communities instead of through experiences outside their direct reach. Make no mistake about it, this is where bigotry lives.

I love my family and the extended community that raised me, however, if I'm being honest, racial slurs and prejudiced thoughts were commonly thrown around in my environment. Those thoughts and words were things that had passed down through generations. I would have been next and I can recall instances where that thinking had started to creep in. But luckily, there were people fighting that. My experience with African American teachers and teacher assistants in my schools left me conflicted. The words I heard outside of school did not match my admiration and love for these people. The more educated I became and the more experiences I had with people unlike myself, the more I learned about myself.

While we would like to believe that the incident in Georgia is something from generations before us, it isn't. And this is why we need to appreciate teachers now more than ever. Make no mistake about it, bigotry lives with ignorance. Our teachers (white, brown, and black) do damage every day to the systemic ignorance that allows these events to continue. I'm proud to say that I learned how to grow out of my past and my environment. And I learned that from teachers that cared about me. It was never in a book or in a curriculum. There was no multiple-choice test. No one got a bonus for teaching it well. But teachers taught me to be a better human.

Today, I don't have to deal with the words and ideas of my upbringing. It is something that has been lost in my family. My parents no longer condone it and my children do not even know about it. It's foreign enough now that when I heard about Ahmaud Arbery, it was a harsh reminder of reality for others. So as we end this year's Teacher Appreciation Week, on what would have been Arbery's 26th birthday, I want to say thank you to teachers for changing lives. Your love and compassion for children, coupled with the opportunities of education, will continue to work to erase ignorance in all forms. I just wish we had kids with us right now, because we still have some very important work to do.