She taught in schools with farm families and with students from rural poverty. She taught in the Knoxville public schools while Dad did doctoral work at the University of Tennessee, and she taught at a school where many parents were highly-educated scientists at the atomic facility at Oak Ridge. For most of her career, however, she taught 6th grade at Forest Hills Elementary School, a "baby boom" school built in the mid-1960s in Florence, Alabama.
Mom loved helping children learn, and she was distressed by waste in all its manifestations. Years later, as she reflected on her career, she recalled often saying hello to a boy who had been consigned to the hallway outside a fifth grade classroom. To Mom, that desk in the hallway represented unrealized potential with red hair. A young man wasn't learning, and his classroom had a boy-shaped hole in it. The next fall he appeared on her roster. On the first day of school, she brought him out in the hall and told him, "You won't spend this year in the hallway. You'll stay in here with the rest of us, and we'll work hard, and we're all going to learn together, and I wanted you to know that." He was a good student, and when she reminisced, she was especially proud of him.
The day after Mom died, my brother received this email from a red-haired attorney:
... If she was as good a mom as she was a teacher then you were truly blessed beyond measure. I've told you this before, but Mrs. Farmer was the very best teacher I ever had. And I had some great ones … Sixth grade was a turning point in my life. I'm convinced God placed her in my path and I'm forever grateful for that Angel being there to lift me when I needed it. She was the perfect combination of love, discipline, knowledge, humor when appropriate and no-nonsense when it was time to buckle down. Her personal investment and interest in me seemed (and I'm sure was) genuine... I am forever grateful and appreciative for the tremendous and life-long impact Mrs. Farmer had on me… She truly earned her wings well before entering Heaven.Today's teachers are no longer allowed to relegate students to hallways for long periods of time. The challenge for each of us, however, is to identify whether we may have mentally or emotionally exiled someone. Students need to feel that we believe they have something to offer, that our classroom communities are enriched by their contributions, and that we care enough to persist with them when they seem difficult. I'm a teacher too. If you teach, join me this week in honoring a teacher who made a difference — by doing a personal classroom audit for that "out of sight, out of mind" student on whom we may have given up hope without fully realizing it. Then pull the exile back into the circle.
