Man In Uniform

In recent years, a number of people have mistaken me for one of my brothers. I suppose it’s easy to do. All three of us stand a little more than six feet tall, have brown hair, and have voices that are eerily similar. The other mistake people make is assuming that two of us are actually twins. Now this is one that I don’t quite understand. It’s one thing to mix up a name, but to wonder if we’re twins is a bit of a stretch.

I’ve had people ask if Mike and I are twins, even though he’s five years older and we look alike about as much as Ben and Casey Affleck do. People have also thought that Bobby and I are twins, despite the fact that we’re actually six years apart and that Bobby has roughly 8% of the amount of facial hair that I have.

Seriously, if only I had a dollar for every time someone has assumed that two of us were actually twins…

I’d have somewhere in the neighborhood of $14.

Unfortunately, as his memory has slowly deteriorated over the last decade, my granddad has become someone who has frequently mistaken us for one another. A few years ago I walked up to him, and his first question was, “How are the stocks?”, a question meant for Mike, the Chicago businessman. I politely reminded him that he was talking to me, the schoolteacher. Then, there was the birthday letter he wrote to me two years ago. Halfway through the letter, he began asking me questions about college that were actually meant for Bobby, who was attending the University of Nebraska-Lincoln at the time. Thankfully, Granddad’s learned not to worry about it too much when he confuses us brothers for one another. Internally, I can tell he feels terrible, yet he smiles, laughs, and doesn’t allow it to get in the way of spending time with his grandsons. This is a lesson I’ll get back to in a minute.

During my time as a teacher, I’ve learned that I too can be mistaken. One instance involves two mischievous seven-year old boys and a surprising vocabulary. The second is a rather sad realization that I’ve made during the first two weeks of the current school year.

We’ll start with the story of the two boys. Like I did last week, I’ll use different names for the students I mention in order to protect them from the attention they may otherwise receive when this blog becomes an international success (I was hoping it would have by now. Perhaps one of these days a reader from a city like Copenhagen will post a comment about what an awesome blog this is, and then we’ll all celebrate).

It was late April of my second year of teaching, and I was attempting to teach my first graders about American Indians one afternoon. We were learning about what they did for food, shelter, clothes, etc. As I stood in front of the class trying my best to keep their attention from wandering to the recess that was quickly approaching, William raised his hand to tell me that his mom spoke the language of the Cherokee people. William had a habit for coming up with elaborate stories that he would try to convince the class were absolutely true. He had been doing this all year, and I had learned that if I called him out on it, he’d then try to pass it off as a joke that he was trying to pull on the rest of the class. When he made the claim that his mother could speak Cherokee, I couldn’t help but laugh. (At that point in the year, I’d gotten to know his mom and knew there was about a 0.2% chance that his claim was true). I then responded with a sarcastic, “Oh, really?” William, realizing that there was no way of backing up his statement, began to laugh. The rest of the class started laughing as well.

Among the other students was a boy named Matthew. Now, you have to know that Matthew was about as ornery as they come, was incredibly impulsive, and possessed one of the biggest hearts of any student I’ve had. As William and the rest of the class began laughing, Matthew, with his back turned to William, shouted what I thought was an insult that shouldn’t be in the vocabulary of a seven-year old (or anyone else’s for that matter). In the interest of being politically correct, I won’t write what I thought was said. Let’s just say that what I thought I heard starts with an F and rhymes with quag.

Instinctually, I said, “Matthew, you can’t say something like that.” Matthew then turned around with a grin spread from ear to ear and said, “What?! I called him a fab. You know, a fabricator!”

Needless to say, I was more than a little relieved. Here it was, I was about to reprimand Matthew for saying a word that he had no business using, and it turned out that he had actually used a word I couldn’t believe he knew and understood well enough to use it in proper context. My guess is, given his orneriness, he’d been called a “fab” once or twice himself.

I wish I had a funny story for every time I’ve been mistaken in the classroom. In a previous post, I mentioned my interest in teaching in a diverse environment and how that desire played an important role in my decision to accept a job at Franklin Elementary in Omaha.

When the annual state reading scores were made public last week, I realized the mistake I’d made. The Omaha World Herald included a breakdown of how the 145 elementary schools in Douglas and Sarpy counties had scored. While I was surprised at just how low Franklin scored (we were 143rd), something other than our score was what truly caught my attention. The far right-hand column of the report listed the percentage of low-income students for each school. Do you know where Franklin ranked? In a competition no one wants to win, we came in first with 96% of our students coming from low-income households.

Think about that for a minute. That means 96% of students attending Franklin are eligible for free or reduced lunches. It also means that most of the entire school eats breakfast in the school’s cafeteria every morning. Sadly, for some students breakfast is the first meal they’ve had since lunch the previous day.

Here it was I thought I was going to a school where everyone was going to be different. Unfortunately, the poverty in which most of the students come from makes them similar.

Like Granddad, I’ve learned that being mistaken can be something to laugh about, and, as I’m learning this year, it can also be something that tears you up inside. The key is to follow Granddad’s lead. If I can’t smile and get on with the day, then what good would I be to my kids. Their lives are hard enough already. They don’t need to deal with their teacher getting choked up every time he thinks about the difficulties they're faced with on a daily basis.