How a teacher’s impact goes beyond the classroom

By Gab­by Esposito

May 9, 2021

Almost a decade ago, I wit­nessed my mom earn her degree in edu­ca­tion. Some­how the decade before rais­ing three chil­dren didn’t wear her out because she soon began stu­dent teach­ing, sub­sti­tute teach­ing, and final­ly teach­ing full-time at mid­dle schools and high schools. At the time, I was the age of her stu­dents. The tears that came with each les­son she planned quick­ly con­vinced me to cross teacher off my list of poten­tial careers. Elim­i­nat­ed before that was any­thing in the med­ical field due to my habit of faint­ing at the sight of blood.

How­ev­er, my high school class­es soon taught me that the sci­ence and math­e­mat­i­cal-focused futures were alto­geth­er not for me and I would have to accept that the lib­er­al arts degree was in my genes. The idea of study­ing Eng­lish was not attrac­tive to me with my moth­er being an Eng­lish teacher because I felt I had already earned a home­school degree.

Grow­ing up, she read “To Kill A Mock­ing­bird” as a bed­time sto­ry and fed me gram­mar for break­fast. She read over every mid­dle school essay, cor­rect­ed every mis­spelled text, and ensured that the pow­er of lan­guage would not be lost on me.

Ulti­mate­ly, I chose jour­nal­ism because of this (and to spite this… It was at least a lit­tle different).

“My first year teach­ing there, I quit on the last day of school. I hat­ed it,” my moth­er tells me. After tak­ing a long-term sub­sti­tute posi­tion the next year at a mid­dle school and tra­di­tion­al high school, she got a call from ACE again ask­ing for her to come back. She agreed, hav­ing real­ized that the oth­er schools didn’t feel as much like a home as ACE, despite the chal­lenge it had been.

My mom has been there for almost sev­en years now and though her les­son plans have got­ten eas­i­er, she brings home much more than those now. Her role has expand­ed from going through the tragedy of Romeo and Juli­et with her stu­dents, to also help­ing her stu­dents through their own tragedies, whether it be the death of a friend, preg­nan­cies, the absence of a par­ent due to sub­stance addic­tion, or crip­pling anx­i­ety and depres­sion. My mom has gone through the stages of grief with many stu­dents in all of these situations.

She tells me that she has griev­ed the deaths of four of her stu­dents in her sev­en years there. This is some­thing her train­ing nev­er taught.

How­ev­er, the sto­ries are not all loss­es. In par­tic­u­lar, my mom recalls to me the sto­ry of one stu­dent who had one of the biggest impacts on her and to whom she also had a great impact.

The student’s real name was John, but my mom says that on the first day, he told her to call him ‘Taco.’ He said, “Daniela, John is such a com­mon name and I’m not com­mon. Taco is a name no one has, I’m Mex­i­can, and also I real­ly like tacos.”

Accord­ing to my mom, Taco was a dif­fi­cult stu­dent with a tough home life and had been in his senior year for near­ly three years. He nev­er took things too seri­ous­ly and was always jok­ing around; a qual­i­ty that served as both a lifeboat for his strug­gles, but a down­fall when it came to his grades in school.

“One day, he comes into my class and says, ‘I’m scared,’” my mom says. He told her how his girl­friend had just got­ten preg­nant and she want­ed to keep the baby and he had no idea how to be a father, much less suc­ceed on his own. After lis­ten­ing to more about his sit­u­a­tion, my mom pro­ceed­ed to tell him, “All you have to know to do it right is by mak­ing every deci­sion with and for the love of your baby.”

Taco became more seri­ous about his grades and focused on final­ly grad­u­at­ing this time. As grad­u­a­tion approached, it seemed as though he might not grad­u­ate due to a grade in one class just shy of pass­ing. Accord­ing to my mom, she was dis­ap­point­ed hear­ing he did not grad­u­ate in time to walk. Appar­ent­ly, so was every oth­er teacher at ACE as they band­ed togeth­er to help him pass after school had end­ed. Ulti­mate­ly, what brought his grade in the one class up to pass­ing and to earn­ing his diplo­ma, was an essay he wrote on “How to be a Father.”

My mom is now friends with Taco and his girl­friend on Face­book and con­tin­u­al­ly gets updates about them and their baby. On each Mother’s Day, Taco sends my mom a mes­sage thank­ing her.

ACE is a school that stu­dents choose to attend and isn’t the type of school where they watch the clock antic­i­pat­ing dis­missal. It is their home, and often they dread the end of the school day. My mom is not sim­ply their teacher, but she is also their par­ent, care­tak­er, nurse, men­tor, social work­er, Uber dri­ver, and ani­mal shelter.

For this rea­son, the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic has made the past year extreme­ly dif­fi­cult for ACE. Aside from the fact that many stu­dents lacked tech­nol­o­gy and wifi to log into vir­tu­al class, they also lacked the home life, care, and safe­ty that ACE pro­vid­ed. To rem­e­dy this, every stu­dent was sup­plied a Chrome­book, wifi hotspot, free break­fast and lunch, coun­sel­ing, and count­less dri­ve­way vis­its from the Prin­ci­pal, Social Work­er, Guid­ance Coun­selor, and teach­ers, like my moth­er. For every hol­i­day, she drove to the eight hous­es with­in her guid­ance fam­i­ly to deliv­er care pack­ages to let them know she still cared.

But for two stu­dents, the pan­dem­ic has also been a bless­ing. Accord­ing to my mom, she has two juniors in her class with debil­i­tat­ing social anx­i­ety. Before the pan­dem­ic, they showed up to school for only about 70 of the 180 days, so their chances of ever grad­u­at­ing would have been small. How­ev­er, as class­es became vir­tu­al, much of their anx­i­ety was relieved allow­ing them to show up and com­plete assign­ments. With­in the past year, they have excelled and are on tar­get going to grad­u­ate next spring.

The impact my mom has on her stu­dents is impact­ful to me. From shar­ing my mom’s car rides with an ACE stu­dent and adopt­ing the kit­tens of an ACE stu­dent who couldn’t afford to take care of them, to say­ing a prayer for a stu­dent and attend­ing the school’s Thanks­giv­ing lunch, I have come to know and appre­ci­ate each of her stu­dents and col­leagues as I hear the sto­ries of tri­umph and tribulation.

“We are all an eclec­tic group,” my mom says about ACE. “To use a metaphor, we are a mixed can of nuts. We are all so dif­fer­ent in our own ways, but some­how when we come togeth­er, we are bet­ter and so much stronger.”