This comment comes from an entry I wrote a few weeks ago, What is the Real Job of Teachers, and it’s one of those stories that needs to be shared. It comes from teacher-blogger Bruce Schauble, and it’s just wonderful. Enjoy.

I coached girls’s basketball as well for close to 20 years, and I agree that there is nothing quite as intense and satisfying as work with a group of motivated kids toward a common goal. Especially when you get to work with them several years in a row; there’s time to really get to know them. I haven’t coached in 8 years now, and I miss that.

But I’ve also got a different kind of example. Six years ago my department head came to me and asked me if I would be interested in tutoring an incoming freshman. My exerience with tutoring to that point had not been wonderful. Too many of the kids I tutored had had issues way beyond what I was going to be able to deal with by reviewing the material at hand.

But my DH said, “No, this kid is good, she wants to work on poetry.” So I told him we’d give it a shot on a trial basis. After the first two weeks of working with her I called up her parents and told them I’d be happy to work with her, but I wasn’t going to accept any money for it. Each week for the next four years this young woman would show up in my office with a draft of a poem. We’d talk it over and often I’d wind up sharing other poems with her I thought she might like. She was a remarkable writer. She was in to all appearances an ordinary kid. You wouldn’t pick her out of a crowd and say “There’s the poet.” But she kept showing up, week after week, with poems of startling originality of conception, and she had an intuitive sense of craft. One of her junior school teachers called her an “old mind,” and it turned out that one of her ancestors had been a court poet for the emperor of Japan, so maybe she did.

She wound up becoming the editor of the school literary magazine (which I advise), publishing dozens of poems there and in several real-world literary journals, and eventually heading off to Wellesley College.

During her senior year, we would often sit at a bench outside in the sun (I teach in Hawaii) with a stack of poetry books and drafts of her poems as she worked toward organizing the book she eventually put together. Those hours were among the most satisfying I have spent as a teacher. And I came close to turning them down at the outset.

Thank you, Mr. Schauble, for sharing your story with me (and us).