His Delight Is In Me

The fluorescent lights flickered on, a few seconds late as usual. They were on a motion sensor, and every morning for the past five months, the delay was just sufficient to make her wonder whether they would come on this morning, or whether she had unconsciously flipped the switch off on her way out the door the previous afternoon.

Five months. It didn’t seem possible, but yes, it really had been that long. Five months since she entered the stark classroom on a grey Monday morning, armed with nothing but a nearly empty binder, a tiny Bible and two glossy high-definition satellite image maps: one of the United States and one of the world.

She remembered hanging the maps on the painted brick wall above the sink, feeling foolish for thinking that two pictures could make much difference in the dirty, dingy room. She longed for bright posters, for vibrant landscape photographs, for illustrated graphs and timelines. But her substitute salary could hardly afford such decorations. The other teacher had left little decoration in the room, besides the school-mandated “seven habits of highly effective people” written with magic markers in lovely penmanship on squares of white poster board. How she would have loved to trade the trite sayings (sharpen the saw, begin with the end in mind) for familiar proverbs and comforting promises from Scripture. But of course, in this public school classroom, that was even more impossible than the landscapes and posters.

In the end, the maps had helped. At least they hid some of the larger stains on the bare wall. At least they provided two familiar things in this strangely foreign world. They had been purchased, once upon a time, by a mother anxious to have her children familiar with world geography. It was good, in the weeks that followed to have that visual reminder that education could be something besides chaos. She clung to that even as she learned to let go of her dream of an enthusiastic, well-ordered group of shining faces eagerly discussing the impact of, say, the feudal system on modern political and social ideals.

Like a homesteader in the pioneer days she had stood in shock that first day at the impossible task before her. As the pioneer may have felt upon discovering that his claim was covered in rocks or a swamp, she was dismayed by the almost physical resistance of her students, by the chaos and despair that had built up in the weeks leading up to the first teachers breakdown. Why had she accepted this job in the first place? What had made her think that she, with plenty of education but almost no training, could reach a group of students who seemed to need discipline far more than they needed math or history? And yet, like that homesteader here she was, with little choice but to accomplish the impossible. Those maps on the back wall became her claim staked on the room and, in a sense, on the children.

It wasn’t much but it was something, and in the weeks and months to come more somethings would follow. Little drawings and notes written by students were hung on the walls and cabinets around her desk. The students desks were arranged in a more approachable order, and the students made to keep them in that order, or at least put them in order before they left the classroom. She had taken a rag and a bottle of windex to the desks, bleaching out marks left by months of pencils and even a few pens and then had taught the children to keep their desk clean if they didn’t want to clean them during recess or lunch. More recently she had begun to use the same bottle of bleach to attack the miniblinds and the book shelves, slowly cutting through years of dirt that had been neglected in favor of more pressing matters, but which, for some reason, seemed almost essential to eradicate.

During the quiet time while students were testing, she had enlisted those who finished early to cut out paper tulips and her paste them against blue construction paper on the windows. There were still no posters or landscapes, but she had finally ventured to hang one verse on the wall, a Proverb, one which was not ostensibly religious but was clearly relevant “Do you see a man who excels in his work? He will stand before kings, he will not be an unknown man.” She left it reference-less. It was no attempt at evangelism, just sound, age-old advice. Surely no one could complain about that.

Today, as she sat behind her desk for a few moments of quiet before the start of the day she took a deep breath. Somewhere in the last five months, this little room had become her own – and it no longer frightened her. The physical changes were reflections of other, less tangible advances, progress so slow and subtle that it was easy to miss on days when she was tired and frustrated or when the noise level was just a bit too much. But it was progress. And she was, at least in this moment, content.