To Teach is To Touch a Life Forever (A Conversation Thanks to John and Harmon)

Both a grandfather and a great-grandfather of mine were pretty much contemporary colleagues of sorts– school teachers in the early 1900’s. My father’s maternal grandfather, Harmon Grimm, taught school school near Trego, Maryland. I do not know what ages or any details, but a family member said he also had a side hustle selling cut timber. My mother’s father, John Curry Linger, was a school teacher in Buckhannon, West Virginia. He also managed a family homestead and it is reported he had high energy and would milk cows and then be seen literally running to the schoolhouse.

While we all are formed by many things, including our own choices of how to think, believe and act as we travel through life and react-or-respond, to some degree I was formed by whatever these two men not only taught to other children in the community, but to their own children.

This morning I think of the popular quotation, “To teach is to touch a life forever.”

I also think of a writing I came across many years ago–probably it was given out as a photocopy for fun at the school where I worked and taught on-and-off for a number of years, but I cannot recall. At one point, I created a calligraphy piece based on it, along with some fun images (a friend actually helped draw these, we worked together on it!)

It is called, “1915 Rules For Teachers.” (shown below)

While certainly many things have changed in a hundred years (see also the other calligraphy quotation below) for better or for worse in the US public educational system, we cannot escape the solid fact that a teacher has the power to change the course of a student’s life.

I can think of many stories of teachers who may have changed my life trajectory for the better, and stories others have told me also come to mind, but time and writing here does not permit the telling.

Many teachers see their work as a ‘calling.’ If they are religious, they take on their work even more diligently, as they see themselves fulfilling a type of both public and personal mission to love, serve, educate and protect the precious lives (and futures) of those within their classroom care.

I have every reason to believe than my great-grandfather Harmon and my other grandfather John were likely two very different men in a number of ways. Yet, given all that is happening in today’s public schools at the hands of religious infiltrators (yes, gender ideology and other non-educational ideologies are religions, with their own vessels of appointed or self-appointed proselytizers and indoctrination resources/texts) who are indeed touching and deeply harming young lives forever, I imagine for a moment what the conversation would sound like if these two men from the early 1900’s were sharing a cup of coffee together.

I think they would easily agree that our society and the institution of education has become deeply corrupt, failing in teaching the most basic things, and reprehensible. They might even be tempted to use a current military acronym/descriptor that comes to my 2023 mind, but I don’t think they would do that since it would violate unspoken 1915 Teacher Rule #____.

In my imaginations, perhaps John and Harmon would give me a writing assignment:
“Take these ‘rules’ and adapt them according to what you now behold, in a future we never lived to see. Use what you learned from the book ‘1984,’ written long after we left this world. Make a point, Eileen…and perhaps somehow you can teach someone something that will turn the tide and positively, though likely indirectly, touch a life forever.”

2023 Rules For Teachers

1. You will teach children that marriage is an outdated form of patriarchal oppression. Because you are teaching a theology.
2. You will teach children there is no such thing as a man and a woman, and it is OK to keep company with sexual predators. Because you are teaching a theology.
3. You will hope that you can educate parents enough that they will take their young children to drag shows that begin after 8pm and go on into the night. Because you are teaching a theology.
4. You will travel well beyond your city limits to loiter, protest and proudly advocate for a child’s right to cut off their genitals and otherwise mutilate their soul and body. Because you are teaching a theology.
5. You will teach children that men can physically birth children and be mothers and that if their parents do not agree with queer theory they are abusive and you will do your best to shut down their influence–you will stop at nothing–including sending them in automobiles as runaways to “sanctuary states.” Because you are teaching a theology.
6. You will dye your hair in rainbow colors and model all forms of immodest and otherwise shocking and offensive attire and accessories so that you clearly virtue signal and otherwise normalize the abnormal to children–that you as “gender non-conforming”–so that your students will gravitate to you and you will self-appoint as a “safe person” to them. Cigarettes? That is such old skool vice. Because you are teaching a theology.
7. You clean the classroom? You’ve got to be kidding me. Your classrooms are TikTok and nefarious chatrooms linked to from “safe” school password protected online resources for OUR children–so-called “safe zones” where you bar parents from entry with every last breath that is in you and teach children neo-racism from your false moral highground. Because you are teaching a theology.