Centralight

The gift that George Norma Bailey: Teaching is a human enterprise. It is about helping learners to reach their full potential as human beings, about helping them to become good people. Every moment of every day, education is occurring; someone is learning something and someone is teaching. And everyone is a teacher, teaching someone how to do something, how to interact, how to be kind, how to live life. Given this premise, what life lessons have I learned and have I lived by? "I believe people are inherently good at heart. People aren't born prejudiced. They don't come out of the womb mean." Think about the billions and billions of people who have ever lived. Each one of those lives had a story, a meaning and a connection to somebody. A really important part of who I am is my belief that every person has worth and dignity. There's an important story in every single person. You need to listen for that story, always challenging your assumptions, never judging someone on a first impression. I'd like to share how I learned this. My first year of teaching I had a boy named George, a ninth grader in remedial math class, and every day 8 centralight fall '13 he'd walk in, put his head down and go to sleep. I'd do the normal things teachers do; I'd nudge him, and he'd look up and say, "What? I'm OK," and then I'd walk away, and he'd put his head back down. Frustrated, I went to the other teachers. They said, "Oh, don't worry about him. His parents don't care; he doesn't care. He's not going to make it." This didn't feel right, so I continued asking. I discovered that he lived with a family of 11 people – nine kids, two parents. They lived in the woods in a great big, old house. No windows – just openings with plastic over them – and one bed for all 11 people. Of course, he spent all his time trying to meet his basic need for sleep. I have always remembered this as "the gift that George gave me." He didn't know he gave me a gift, and I don't think I realized it at the time, but from then on, I have never looked at any kid the same. It is always, "What's this student's story?" It is a natural extension from there to all people. "What's this person's story?" I believe people are inherently good at heart. People aren't born prejudiced. They don't come out of the womb mean. That is taught. So if that's the case, what has shaped this person? What might I learn from this person? And what part might I play in giving him or her another option? I regard every person I meet as a gift – to learn from this person, to learn about the person that I am becoming and how we fit into and make a difference in the world. I try always to answer Mary Oliver's challenge: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" I want my life to have made a difference; I want to have spent my life making the world a better place. I believe that to do that, I must be willing to speak up. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." What matters to me are people and how we live our lives, individually and collectively, with and for one another. Two hundred years from now, I'll be gone. I'll be just another statistic in history, one of those billions of people who have passed through life. I believe that my eternity resides in what I share with people, my students and others. What I share they will pass on. Soon my name will be forgotten. But what I have shared, what I have taught, how I have lived goes on and on. That's my eternity. • Norma Bailey was a teacher for 20 years before earning her doctoral degree. She is currently a professor of middle level education at CMU. She was named Michigan Professor of the Year in 2007 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. As told to Cynthia J. Drake

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