Let me tell you a story that has been haunting me for the past year or more.
Once upon a time, there was a bright little girl, with wispy blonde hair and eyes like rain clouds whose head was filled with daydreams and whose heart was generous and gentle. The little girl was quite smart, even a little sarcastic at times, but she was also a scrupulous child, terrified of putting a single foot wrong. Though her mother tried to help her see the difference between making-a-mistake-because-you-are-learning and doing-bad-things-on-purpose, the little girl still held herself to impossible standards.
Her second grade teacher was highly experienced, and sure of her own expertise. But she was not an expert in human nature, nor was she experienced in looking closely at the kids in her class. Somehow, the teacher only seemed to see the worst in the little girl. She saw her attention wander in class, but didn’t see the vivid, creative stories the little girl came up with while daydreaming. Nor did the teacher wonder why the girl was always daydreaming. Consistently at the top of her class, reading and doing math well above grade level, the girl was not challenged by the material and admitted to her mother that she often “made movies in my head that I can write stories about later” when class, all too often, became boring. Rather than seeing a gifted, quiet child who needed more challenge, the teacher saw only a quiet little blonde airhead who couldn’t pay attention.
So the only time the little girl was noticed was when she was being corrected—told she was doing something wrong. She was rarely, if ever, praised for doing something right. Slowly, she began to withdraw. She grew quiet, then quieter, and quieter still. Until finally she was almost entirely silent. Even at home, where she had once been an unstoppable chatterbox, the little girl became a ghost of herself. She grew more afraid of the dark, of being alone, of bathrooms. She stopped creating stories. Stopped drawing. Stopped writing. She became a shadow, trying to make herself as invisible as possible, hoping that if no one saw her, they wouldn’t see how many mistakes she made.
It didn’t work.
The teacher continued to pick at her faults and ignore her strengths. When the little girl’s test scores qualified her to be considered for advanced placement, the teacher rated her as low as she could on all fields.
One of those fields was a rating of how often the child showed concern for others. The irony of that teacher’s rating is blinding. On “bartering day” when the girl’s handmade origami jumping frogs were wildly popular, she came home and spilled out her bartered treasures into a pile of bounty. And there, tucked among the treasures, were several scribbled, uneven bookmarks. She admitted she hadn’t wanted them. But she’d noticed that no one was trading with the kids who brought them, so—quietly and without drawing any attention to herself—she offered to trade with each of them because, “I wanted them to have fun too.” But because she had done it in her characteristically quiet way, it went unnoticed by any but the kids she had quietly included. And so the teacher—who never looked too closely—marked that the little girl "rarely showed concern for others."
All of the ratings were like that. Completely divorced from who the little girl really was—because the teacher, in all her years of experience, never took the time to know her at all. And when the little girl's distress began to manifest in quiet but unmistakable ways, she hid that too. True to form, the teacher didn’t notice how distressed the little girl had become, not even when her mother called in devastated panic.
Those ratings kept her out of the advanced class for third grade. But worse—far worse—was what the teacher’s cold indifference did to her spirit. It pushed an innocent, creative child into silence and fear. It took a full year—and some professional intervention—to bring her back. To get her laughing again. Creating again. Speaking again. Being her funny, quirky, brilliant self out loud once more.
What helped most of all was a new teacher. One who took the time to know her. Who kindly refused to let her hide. Who noticed when she got things right.
There’s still a lot of anger toward that first teacher. Anger that someone charged with helping children grow could have stunted the growth of a good little girl whose only fault was her quiet daydreaming.
And though it is unlikely that the little girl’s mother will ever forgive that teacher, in the end, it’s the teacher herself who lost the most. She spent an entire year in the same room as a child with an imagination the size of the universe. A child whose creativity pours out of her in quiet floods, whose humor is sharp and well beyond her years, whose capacity to love is as deep and forgiving as the sea.
And the teacher never knew it. Because she never looked.
As for the little girl, a year in the classroom with her 3rd grade teacher did much to heal what that first teacher had wrought. In fact, even her characteristic quiet is dissolving, as she learns to use her voice—mostly in writing—to advocate for others. She even organized a picketing protest to raise teacher pay at her school, including a letter writing campaign to the superintendent. And while she was accepted into the advanced placement program for the next year, it wasn’t because she had become smarter, or louder, or suddenly gifted. It was because of a teacher who took the time to see that some still waters are deep enough to hold worlds.
