Michele Grooms-Massa has been my daughter's teacher for nearly ten years now.
In seventh grade at Urban Community School, Sarah entered into the world Michele creates, inhabits and shares everyday.
And despite Sarah having moved on to high school, college and graduate school since then, Michele is still her teacher.
Earlier this week, I stopped in to see Michele to pick up the wreaths she and her current eighth graders created as wintertime gifts for the hospice patients for whom I provide care. Sarah tagged along to see her former homeroom, writing and theology teacher again and to catch up a bit.
I'm often in Michele's classroom these days, collaborating and conspiring to encourage kids to grow into actively-caring and engaged members of the community; but Sarah hasn't even seen the long-deserved new classroom in which Michele teaches now.
As we walked in, Michele and I embraced warmly, then she turned toward Sarah more formally--till she realized that the beautiful woman tagging along with me is not a work colleague, but the very grown up Sarah Maria Hess. I grin even as I recall Michele's shock at the sight of Sarah the Adult!
They fell all over each other verbally, spilling out questions and updates and ideas in a madcap, excited rush. Sarah remembered aloud the deep significance of one's seating assignment in Michele's desk-clusters--and how you'd have to really learn how to get along with people you didn't know or maybe even didn't like that much, depending who else was assigned.
Michele asked Sarah what's next on the agenda--which includes my daughter's brave, risky, imminent move to Chicago.
"What are you going to do there?" Michele queried.
"Welllll, find a job, I guess, first," Sarah replied semisheepishly.
A little surprised, Michele followed up with a smile, "Yes, that would be good! What kind of jobs are you looking for?"
With a wee giggle of knowingness, Sarah admitted, "I don't know yet--grassroots campaign work, community organizing, development, Starbucks, nannying! Right now, anything that'll pay the bills!"
"So what's motivating the move?" Michele continued, clearly proud and excited on Sarah's behalf.
And Sarah expounded about her experiences as an improv comedienne and her intention to pursue training and experience as a political comedy writer in a city rich with such opportunities. Michele glowed happiness, hearing the voice of the vivacious, ambitious, witty and adventurous young woman standing before her, nearly a decade past her seventh grade awkwardness, ready to take on the world. Sarah's confidence visibly expanded in the warm encouragement of her teacher.
"Sarah, will you come in and talk to the students before you go?"
With one question, one sentence of invitation, Michele became Sarah's teacher again.
"I don't think I have anything to tell them!" Sarah doubted aloud in the car. But a challenging assignment from Ms. Michele is not to be ignored.
Twenty four hours later, Sarah spent the afternoon in Michele's classroom once more.
In those moments of catching up and caring about each other, Michele grasped, as ever, the power of story. Eternally committed to the life-success and empowerment of her students, she knew that the story and witness of a girl "just like them" who had lived, learned, laughed, struggled and studied as a junior high kid at UCS and had now achieved not just high school, but college, grad school and.....well, is off on a grand adventure in life would reach into some of her current students' souls, lifting them into the second half of this school year.
And Michele is a teacher to the depth of her being. So I bet she knew on some level, anyway, the gift she gave to Sarah that day, inviting her to see in her own story, too, a meaning deeper than she had realized. Michele's invitation to be an example was also an invitation to self-awareness and self-understanding. The woman cannot not-be a teacher.
I am grateful.
