Why I Teach: My Grandfather's Legacy

As a child I knew my grandfather was different. Grandpapa had been a sharecropper in southern Indiana. He had worked most of his adult life raising corn and pigs. His hands were big and callused. He stooped when he walked and the skin on his neck and face was scarred. His earlobes were long, stretched and fused down low at the back of his jawbone. His eyes seemed to be a bit elongated in their sockets. He was different because he looked different. You see, when he was a young child he had played with matches and caught his clothes on fire. His facial disfigurement was the price he paid for the bad judgment of a toddler.

He was a good man. He read the Bible every day, taught Sunday school lessons at the local Baptist church and loved reciting the poetry of James Whitcomb Riley, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. With a loving wife, two dutiful sons and a gaggle of grandkids, he was a pretty happy guy. He raised gladiolus, built a wonderful tree house for the grandkids and pressed his own apple cider every fall. Grandpapa had lived a pretty good life by the time he died.

But the life he lived wasn’t the life he had planned. In the 1920s, he had worked his way off the farm and enrolled at Indiana University. He wanted to be a teacher. The first member of his family to go to college, he worked hard at his studies those first few months of his freshman year. But before the year was up, he was back on the farm. College hadn’t worked out after all. A problem had come up – over which he had no control. It had to do with the way he looked. Professors in the education department had told him that he couldn’t be a teacher because his face would scare the kids.

Devastated, he pulled the plug on his studies and went home. Grandpapa had been a victim of discrimination. Hopefully, in this day and age, something like this would not happen. And one could make an argument that Grandpapa could have courageously continued in his studies and fought his way to fulfill his dream. But I can no more judge his decision then than I can blame him for his burn injuries. Being a teacher, at a minimum, requires having rapport with students. The thought of scaring them would clearly have planted some seeds of doubt.

I have been teaching for 27 years. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think of my grandfather. I recite some of the same poems to my second-graders that he recited to me. I grow flowers and enjoy apple cider. But most importantly I see his face. He didn’t scare me. He loved me. He was my Grandpapa and I loved him. 

I have been able to follow my dream of becoming a teacher. It is clear to me now that, given my own good fortune, I have learned something from Grandpapa’s misfortune. I realize that I have a special responsibility to embrace difference among my students and practice compassion as an essential part of my pedagogy. As I see and honor difference, I work to be attuned to the needs of all children. Physical disability, race, culture, ethnicity, gender identity, poverty, and learning differences are just a few of the forces that press themselves upon the mindful teacher. Beyond these, it is essential to take the next step and see the child as an individual—an individual with a soul.

A child’s sense of identity and his or her experiences, thoughts, worries and history are all inextricably linked to how the child will learn. If a child does not feel safe, if a child questions his or her inner spirit, if a child has little confidence, that child will struggle to learn. How my grandfather was treated caused him to doubt himself. He must have suffered when he realized that others were judging him for how he looked. His experience sensitized me to the suffering of others.

I know my job as a teacher requires me to do my best to reach all of my students. But thanks to my grandfather, I pay especially close attention to the ones on the margins. It is my belief that it is an educator’s job to provide a safe environment—to let every student follow his or her dream. And we must work together to help those dreams come true.

Rouse teaches at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia.

Want to write your own “Why I Teach” column? Check out the guidelines here [2].