What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [103]
While the officer was recovering from his laughter, a janitor appeared at Nancy’s door. “It’s Tony! It’s Tony! I’m saved!” she shouted.
Her co-teacher, Jody Stapleton, who has three decades of teaching experience, says the first time he saw Nancy marching her second-graders along a sidewalk at the school, he assumed—watching the children’s cooperative behavior—that she was a veteran teacher. It was only later, when he discovered a minor gaffe—she was sending home the next marking period’s empty report cards with the graded report cards—that he learned she was a rookie. He had the students hand over the ungraded report cards before they left the classroom. “I knew I would like Nance after that because she came to me and said, ‘Thank you, Jo, thank you for saving me.’ She wasn’t at all defensive,” he said.
His appreciation of her grew steadily afterward. “She loves her students and will do anything for them. Her mothering skills kick in a lot, and though a lot of us have had that trained out of us, she knows how to use it. She’s organized, high energy, and full of life. As all good teachers, she questions everything she does. I look forward to coming to school every day because of her.” Stapleton, at fifty-two, had hoped to retire in a couple of years, but his investments in rental properties have suffered badly and his retirement will probably be postponed for a decade. “I sometimes wonder how I’m going to do it, then I look at Nancy and I laugh. If she can do it, I can. She’s a role model to me.”
As I watched Nancy Gagliano teach her second-grade class, I found my mind drifting a bit. What could be more of a challenge or more worthy of the word “success”? What could be of greater significance than becoming a master teacher of second-graders and helping them build a foundation for their own successful lives?
It’s doubtful that her students will even consider Nancy’s age when, years hence, they look back at their own class photo to remember who they were and see her standing there. More likely, they will remember her stories, her sense of humor, her warmth, and her ferocious determination to teach them.
“I’ll continue to teach for a few more years, until after Jim is gone,” Nancy told me in her quietest voice. “Then, who knows?”
She was modest and cheerful about what she had accomplished. Maybe if she had started earlier, she said, or had more seasoning, she might have been better at analyzing her students’ learning issues or at formulating teaching practices, “but as a teacher, I think I’m very good at making them understand what they need to know. Where I shine is being someone they know they can trust. Someone they can come to with their problems, in the classroom and outside. I have a knack with kids.”
MYRNA HOFFMAN
Reflecting Success
“What keeps me going . . . ?
The universal‘oohs’and‘aahs.’”
In October 1989, single mom Myrna Hoffman faced a minor dilemma. Her daughter, Nell, was turning seven in Montclair, New Jersey, an affluent and competitively child-centered suburb where it had become de rigueur for parents to stage elaborate theme parties for their children’s birthdays. Nell petitioned innocently for something special of her own. Myrna was then forty-seven years old and struggling, financially and emotionally, with the protracted after-math of an ugly divorce. She did not have the wherewithal to indulge her dark-haired second-grader with a bash. But an artist, illustrator, animator, and educator, Myrna was nothing if not resourceful.
When parents arrived to pick up their children after Nell’s party, they opened the