Be Kind Get Better

The power of storytelling, mentorship, and relentlessly seeking to know who you are

Fresh out of the military, still rocking a high-and-tight and diligently ironing my t-shirts, I took an aide position at a K-6 elementary school in Huntington Beach, CA. After I was there a couple months, the administration had an idea to start a P.E. program with the lower grades. Since such a role wouldn’t require a proper teaching credential, they asked if I’d be interested in leading it. I hoped to someday be an official teacher, and figured this would be good realtime practice alongside my formal education. I agreed to do it, and because I had no context for class management, lesson planning, or basically anything that might help me pull it off, I was assigned a mentor teacher, Mrs. P, who promptly scheduled a short, introductory meeting one afternoon after the kids had left for the day.

Mrs. P had been teaching third grade for decades. Her age, to me, was a mystery. She could have been thirty five or seventy five. The swatch of white hair atop her head made it tough to know for sure. I also couldn’t read her demeanor. In all my interactions with her, her affect had been stone-faced and serious, unlike her peers who went out of their way to make me feel welcome. Mrs. P’s inordinately well-behaved students—alarmingly quiet in the hallways, facing forward, hands pressed to their sides—always made me wonder if they were simply playing out learned coping mechanisms to avoid the wrath of their strict teacher.

Kindergarten class aide (1994)

Something about Mrs. P made me think of Little House on the Prairie, my favorite TV show growing up. But it wasn’t the show’s teacher she resembled. LHOTP’s Miss Beadle’s kind carriage, her perfect lacy cuffs, her percussive heels on the classroom floorboards—such characteristics ranked her off a different ilk.

There was, rather, an element of pioneer badassery at play in my imagination. Mrs. P was kempt and poised as she floated spectrally across the playground in her long dresses—equally equipped, or so it seemed, to corral children for an afternoon reading lesson, or roll up her modest sleeves and chop a cord of black ironwood. Mrs. P’s sternness resembled something lost and old fashioned. It struck me as both appealing and terrifying. Something hardened and callous. The simplest takeaway went without saying—Mrs. P was not to be messed with.

I arrived early for our meetup. When I entered her classroom, the lights were switched off and she was absent. A wash of afternoon sun through wall-length windows illuminated a calm glow. I scanned the room of tiny desks and child-sized tables, then took a seat in a tiny blue chair that situated my knees above my hips. I set my paper and pen just so on the low table before me.

The clock above the chalkboard hummed as a red second hand raced around the numbered face. Children’s art and corrected work covered walls decorated with colored construction paper and animated borders. The week’s Star Student was Madison B, one of three Madisons in the class.

To kill time, I bent over to loosen and retie my sneakers. I still did it how I was taught: left over right and under, pull, make two bunny ears, then another left over right and under, pull again. The long bows always ended up aligned from toe to heel rather than across the width of my foot. Someone once told me this was because I tied my shoes wrong. “You’re doing it left-handed,” they said. Which made sense since my parents are both lefties.

Mrs. P entered the room in a blur, which startled me and made my untied shoelace splay onto the dark rug. She greeted me twice, hello hello, then said she’d have to cut the meeting a little shorter than we had planned. “My trainer changed our session time,” she said as if I was somehow attuned to details of her personal life. She must have noticed my startled look. “You don’t think an old lady can have a personal trainer?” she said. I fumbled an attempt to respond, tripping over my words before finally crashing into a feeble apology. With a wave she shrugged it off. Told me she was only giving me a hard time. “OK then, you ready to get started?” she said. I told her I was, and at that moment I realized that I, perhaps similar to her students, didn’t see Mrs. P as a person. I only saw her as a teacher. “Great—so Tom, why don’t you tell me a little something about yourself!” she said. I gulped, she took a seat at her desk, and a leaf blower started up outside, kicking up a cloud of thick dust and spent lunch bags.

Mrs. P and I had some unexpected things in common. She was a basketball fan, and, like me, could rattle off player’s names from the 1972 Championship Lakers—Elgin Baylor, Wilt the Stilt, Happy Hairston, Pat Riley, Jerry West, and more. My favorite player, and hers too, coincidentally, was Gail Goodrich. I had his Topps card from ’71 and was smitten by his pose—his upper torso on a pink background; his jersey on backwards to bypass licensing rules; his alliterative name and court position (guard) as an underscore to him gazing at the basketball spinning on his left middle finger. It was like he was consulting a crystal ball.

So smooth

I collected old basketball cards and loved the old-timey postures and vintage aesthetic. Mrs. P, however, simply thought Gail Goodrich was handsome. Over the years I had committed the Lakers roster of my birth year to memory. She knew it because it was the year she roadtripped from from Iowa to California, moving across the country to escape the confines of the midwest. “I got to know the players because I figured it would be a good ice breaker,” she said. “It was only later than I became a fan.”

As our conversation continued, we realized we were both Capricorns. Both ex-Catholics. “But I still pray to my favorite saint—Saint Anthony,” she said. “That’s my middle name,” I responded. I also, somewhat reluctantly, told her I was reading a book by Alan Watts. Unlike every other adult in my circle, she didn’t respond with an eye roll. “I love his stuff,” she said. Told me his best one was, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. And since I hadn’t heard of it, I promptly scribbled the title on my notepaper. I’d buy it that very night at Fahrenheit 451, my favorite bookstore in Laguna.

At some point our sharing of backgrounds organically waned, and Mrs. P got on to business. She extended her arms and officially welcomed me to the field of education, confidently predicting my bright future. “We sure could use more men,” she said.

Mrs. P then told me that teaching is really easy as long as it’s done right. “And it rarely is,” she said. “I am here to tell you all you need to know to be a successful, effective, and beloved teacher.” I grabbed my pen.

Mrs. P said that no matter how long my career spanned, two things will always be true. First of all, every year I’ll have students I love. They’ll raise their hands, behave accordingly, learn from my lessons, come to school wearing clean clothes, have nice parents. They’ll bring me thoughtful gifts around the holidays, leave me kind little notes, and each day they’ll be a reminder about why I got into the field of teaching in the first place. "You will truly love these well-behaved kids,” she said. “Probably even miss them come summertime.”

The second truth, she assured me, was that every year I’d also have students in my class whom I hate. And yes, she used that word, hate. I was raised in a home where staying hate was as unacceptable as the F word. And here Mrs. P was telling me that every year I’d hate my students? I was flabbergasted.

Teaching P.E. to 3rd graders

“Yes, Tom. That’s right. You’ll hate them,” she emphasized. These students, she noted, will make it nearly impossible for me to do my job. They won’t follow rules, they’ll disturb other students, they’ll fail to grasp the easiest concepts no matter how well I teach it. They’ll show up unbathed and stinky. They’ll shout out of turn. They’ll cause commotions, pick their noses, wet their pants, all of which will make me wish they miss the bus. Or get chicken pox. Or move away. These kids, she said, will keep me up at night and make me regularly question my career choice.

“Every year you’ll have kids you love, and every year you’ll have kids you hate,” she said. The leaf blower outside suddenly turned off, and for a few seconds her lingering words hung heavy in my green ears.

Mrs. P continued by saying that my job as a teacher was primarily not to teach. “Teaching students is secondary to your real job,” she said. “Your role as an educator, above all else, is to figure out how to turn those kids you hate into kids you love.” I wrote her words down.

She went on: “Just how to do this—how to love the worst students—is easy. You get to know them. You get to know their story.”

Mrs. P assured me that if I took the time to pay this sort of attention to each of my students, I’d inevitably uncover morsels of relatability that, in turn, will offer crucial insights into who they are as people. I’ll identify buried hints that explain why they act up. Clues to better understand why they insist on being so loud and mean and unpleasant and impossible. Their story will reveal hidden details that illuminate underlying agents of their unlikability. Factors that, every year, make teachers hate them.

Anything I dislike in a student, Mrs. P assured me, probably reflects something about me I’m afraid to face. “Maybe kids talking out of turn irk you because you were too afraid to express yourself when you were their age,” she said. Or perhaps I had a traumatizing experience that triggers big feelings around minor outbursts. “We’re all just grown up, broken kids,” she said. “And if you look inward, which I recommend you do, and do often, you’ll notice that all of your unmet childhood needs have become gaping wounds.”

Mrs. P said that just as much as I am expected to parent students, I’d be smart to do the same for that little kid inside of me who is left in want. Her words made me imagine putting my arm around a little green-eyed redhead with dirty fingernails and tattered Toughskins. Telling this long ago version of me that there’s nothing to be afraid of—not any more, anyhow.

Getting to know folks’ stories—including our own—turned me into a firm believer in the possibility of, and the dire need for, fostering authentic human connections through honest discourse. When I humble myself to the collective sharing of stories, when I carve out space for the purposeful vulnerability required for active listening and honest telling, we, together, find something, small as it might be, utterly in common. Something that reflects our understanding of the world. Something that makes us feel less alone. Maybe we both had a scarce parent. Or were left to fend for ourselves during a crisis. Maybe we spent our lives fighting for attention in a houseful of other kids. There’s a zillion other possibilities—but all are lost unless we take the time to ask, to share.

Stories inevitably offer a mirror into our own psyches. And if we allow it, that mirror gives us a chance to heal our hearts while, at the same time, offering a hand to someone who might benefit from one. The healing strength of truly seeing someone, and being seen, is downright astounding. It’s the kind of alchemy that quickly turns hate into love through a conscious archaeology of understanding.

Mrs. P told me that we should all be so lucky to have so-called “bad kids” in our class—because the challenging students are the only ones who help us become better teachers. They are the only ones who help us evolve into more thoughtful and compassionate humans in this tricky world. “The least you can do as a teacher is humble yourself to any opportunity to do two things,” Mrs. P said. “First of all, be kind to others. And second, say yes to every chance you get to improve as a person.”

Be kind. Get better. I wrote that down, too.

Mrs. P looked at the clock and asked if I had any questions. I peered at the scribbled notes on my paper. “I think I have everything I need,” I said. She smiled and stood up. I did the same and realized that my shoe was still untied. I dropped back into the small chair and quickly did up the laces. “Hey—I like how you do that!” Mrs. P said, motioning to my shoe. “Isn’t it amazing how we carry around things we learn through the years?”

I nodded as I briefly paused, struck by the weight of her words. Then I tightly double-knotted the wonky bows to make them lay flat and ordinary.