“Everyone has the right to draw”
I feel that this little one deserves a chapter of her own. She is the future dressmaker.
I do not know if this is a universal teacher experience or not, but if there is an actual thing like “the student that transformed you as a teacher”, in my case it has got to be Dasha. Much of what my teaching is like and why it is so is because of her. Many of my teaching-related beliefs exist only because this girl happened in my life.
During our first phone conversation, her mother described the girl as authoritative. I said that I would only be available in a week’s time, to prepare for the nightmare I thought was waiting for me. Despite my own precautions, I ended up writing the lesson plan 30 minutes before the class. Typical. There was one line written on my plan — “She’s as afraid as you are”. I have to say putting that down was probably the wisest thing I’ve ever done.
Dasha struck me as an extraordinarily smart little piece of pure wonderfulness. She wasn’t the brightest kid at school — she even managed to get some Cs, but she was clever in that very “down-to-earth” kind of way. She always knew what was going on. When her mother was swearing loudly at some client or whoever else in the other room, she pretended there was not a single sound. She knew her mother struggled to make ends meet and was exhausted all the time, so she never even giggled at the “funny words”.
Naturally, she loved learning. Language itself never entertained her, but games did. As long as I could offer her a nice game to play, she would be a brilliant and efficient learner. So much so that she learned to count to 100 in one class. Sometimes she completed the crosswords I’d composed for her faster than I did. She was good at beating me at my own games, not to mention the ones she used to come up with. We tried to make the classes entertaining together — always both of us involved, cutting paper, colouring things, making clay models, drawing monsters and animals, reading aloud, doing push-ups when you’d blown in a game.
After some time it became clear that there was a close bond between us; I was like an elder sister to her. I cannot be sure if it was right or wrong from the academic point of view on teacher-student relationship, but it was exactly what I embarked on teaching for. I knew that big responsibility came with it, too. Maybe I just never realised just how exactly big.
It was HUGE. Dasha was upset on the days I couldn’t come and cried when I was unwell once. When her mother told me this, the colour flooded to the girl’s cheeks. Much as she was into me, she was also quite secretive and obviously strongly disapproved of such intimate details being blurted out to me. She did often hug me when I was leaving though, but that piece of evidence somehow escaped her notice.
Dasha didn’t have a father. That offers a plausible explanation of why I was so desperate to stock her up with confidence and praise enough to last on for years. Being familiar with the devouring feeling of self “non-importance”, I wanted her to know that she was as much of a person worthy of respect and love as anyone else. I hated to hear her mother call her “not exactly gifted and bad at Maths” and tried to find out what it was she herself was interested in. It turned out to be dress-making..
Dasha helped me rediscover all the love, tenderness and concern that I had disposed of at the moments of my life that had not been too happy. She made me funny bracelets and I wore them proudly, because I had “a child to take care of”. It was Dasha who first inspired me to substitute the verb “to teach” with the phrase “to take care of”, or at least to see teaching as that.
Dasha also never hesitated to inquire any details of my private life she was interested in. There was one question I particularly liked, – “Is there any reason why you’re wearing lipstick and a skirt today? There must be something..”
Somehow I am sure this kid will get everything she wants in life. And I hope everything she deserves, too.
PS: I do not own the picture
grammatically happy 