What Counts as Success

I was rushing from my office to another, trying to get a few things done before my next class, when I walked past one of the tutors, a retiree who comes to our school once a week to help students with math. He was sitting alone at the tutoring table, which is in what amounts to a wide hallway, and which happened to be on my route. I tried to dispense a cursory hello and keep walking, but the tutor, I’ll call him U, wanted to talk.

“The girl I was working with today left early, she didn’t even stay for the whole hour,” he said.

I know the young woman who he’d been working with. I know that for her the simple act of getting to school means fighting off a host of invisible demons that haunt her mind and tell her she can’t do it, that stir up fears that are so real to her that some nights she doesn’t sleep at all. Like all of our students, she’s also a young mother, and has all the stresses that come with being a single parent to deal with – and she’s still a teenager.

U doesn’t know the details of this student’s life, but he knows that she’s got more on her mind than adding fractions.

“It’s just that I wish I could help more,” he said. And now I noticed his eyes were welling up with tears. Obviously I wasn’t going anywhere fast. Suddenly all that mattered was this lovely man’s sorrow and frustration.

I told him all the things I tell myself when I feel discouraged: “You never know what lessons will sink in later on down the line,” and “You can’t underestimate the power of just being here … what it must mean to this student that a retired white guy comes to the school for an hour a week to help her. That alone has to have an impact …” and finally, “We think by coming here to teach we’re going to change a student’s life, but in the end all that we can guarantee is that we might change our own … and that’s good enough.”

But even after I went on my way, and even after I’d finished teaching for the day, U’s tears lingered with me. We all want so badly to help, and some days there’s just no evidence that we’re doing anything more than taking up space.

The next morning I was eating breakfast and preparing to drive a half hour down the highway to teach poetry to a different group of adult literacy learners. I didn’t feel I’d prepared well enough, and my own insecurities were bubbling up about the value of teaching poetry to men and women who were struggling with poverty, mental and physical health issues, neighborhoods riddled with violence and lord knows what else.

I picked up the book on top of the pile of newspapers stacked at my elbow and opened it up. The book was Start Where You Are by Pema Chodron. On the page I opened up to, she was describing a time when she was working with an addict who had managed to stay clean and sober for a long stretch … then went out and used again. Chodron was extremely upset, and when she expressed her discouragement and pain to her teacher she was chastised. Her teacher “said that being upset with Dan’s binge was my problem. ‘You should never have expectations for other people, just be kind to them,’” he told her. “He said that setting goals for others can be aggressive – really wanting a success story for ourselves … Instead, we should just be kind.”

As I drove to the literacy center where I would teach that morning, those words kept running through my head. I forgot the goals I’d set for the morning’s lesson: I wanted the students to learn one of Dickinson’s poems and to learn about her biography, and to write poems that would make me – and them happy. I wanted them to get over their fears of writing … all in a two-hour workshop.

But by the time I reached my destination I had a new goal. I would go in and be kind. We’d read a poem together, we’d talk about poetry, and hopefully we’d have time to write. As long as I kept my heart soft and kindness in my eyes and hands, I’d count the class as a success.

That’s what I did. The class was a pleasure, and, as it turns out, the students wrote amazing poems, too.

On my drive home, I thought again about U’s eyes welling with tears – his kindness overflowing — I knew what I’d known all along, but I knew it stronger now: He’d been a success, too.