My first year in a real teaching job, I was pretty strict. I checked homework; I called parents; I was going to make sure those kids learned French. Then one day while I was checking homework, I must have reprimanded a kid for not doing his work. . . again. As I crossed the room, an instinct told me to duck as Greg, an 8th grader, hurled a book across the room at my head and screamed, “You don’t know what my life is like!” He used language that was much more colorful than I am at liberty to repeat. And I thought, “Nobody told me about this in teaching school.”
So I wrote him up. He probably got detention for cursing, and we all moved on.
I didn’t think any more about Greg until four years later when my sister’s little boy, Alex, was diagnosed with cancer. I would spend sleepless nights in the hospital with him and my sister and then leave straight for work in the morning, showing up and pretending to care about teaching 8th graders how to conjugate irregular French verbs. Day after day, week after week, I’d look bleary-eyed at the kids in the room until one morning, I looked out and saw Greg.
“They don’t know what your life is like,” he said.
I woke up that day as a teacher. I realized that we all show up in class with our “stuff,” and it affects everything we do and everyone we encounter, from our colleagues down the hall to the 140-plus kids we see every day. We show up with custom baggage and so do the kids. The grownups somehow push it to a corner and carry on. But the kids, sometimes they unpack it right there at their desks, and they sort through it while everyone watches. And other times, they just hold it tightly to their chests, possessive of their pain and fearful that someone might take away the one thing that feels familiar.
Four years too late to do him any good, Greg reached out and demanded that I look at him. He pleaded with me to meet him both academically and emotionally, to be in the moment with him because that's the only common ground he might concede. Greg spoke for all the other kids when he whispered, "You might not be able to take away our baggage, but you can at least give us a place to put it down long enough to breathe."
So I spent the next eight years trying my best to be there for my students so they could learn. I was moving along pretty well, enjoying my job and loving the kids. I even spent some time with Nepali children in the Peace Corps. Just when I thought I had figured out this thing called teaching, the universe decided to show me how little I knew.
Everyone says to teachers, “You never know which kid you’re going to affect.” What they don’t tell you in teaching school is that you never know which kid is going to affect you.
In 2006, we were promoting French 1 at Milton High School. About sixty students expressed an interest in taking the class but at the last minute it became clear that the scheduling wouldn’t work. To my disappointment, only two students from the entire group were able to sign up. One of the girls, a rising junior, took a liking to French. She was a star. . . and sweet and kind and everything a teacher could wish for in a student. She became fast friends with a small group of kids who loved anything and everything French.
And half way through the school year, something went horribly wrong.
By summer, we all knew that Courtney had cancer. She might have chosen to go to Paris for a wish trip had the opportunity arisen, but she became too ill, too quickly. Chemo and surgery and radiation began to take their toll. We organized a limo to bring Courtney and two friends to a French restaurant and on a shopping spree, a small dose of happiness for a girl taking too many doses of everything else. Courtney spent most of that summer as a cancer patient confined to her bed and to hospitals, too sick to rise or to eat; yet on that one beautiful evening, three teenage girls showed Atlanta what it meant to be young.
Each time I saw Courtney that summer, her faith grew quietly stronger as her body grew progressively weaker, her spirit more remarkably determined than would seem possible given her physical reality. I suppose if I had known to look, I might have caught of glimpse of wings.
I wanted so much for Courtney to realize her dream of going to Paris. One day, my mom came home and told me she had seen a café table that I might like. For years, I had wanted to transform my whole classroom into a café. In fact, my students in New York called my classroom, “Café Steinhauer.”
So I thought about Courtney, and I thought, “If she can’t go to Paris, then maybe we can bring Paris to her.”
And if not now, when?
Over the course of the summer, through the generosity of my mom and Courtney’s parents, my classroom would eventually become a kind of a tourist destination: nineteen café tables and a little corner of Paris at Milton High School. Courtney had a place waiting for her at her very own French café when she briefly returned to school for her senior year. The City of Light never burned as brightly as when our "Juliette" came to class.
Fall and winter marched on as they must. We gave thanks at Thanksgiving and believed in Christmas miracles and rang in the New Year with a singular prayer in our hearts. Our days passed "more swiftly than a weaver's shuttle" as I have read in the book of Job.
Courtney left us in the spring of 2008. Her café has brought joy to students at Milton and Riverwood High Schools and now to those at Hopewell Middle School. Her courage, her faith, and her love of life continue to be a source of strength for me, to all those who knew her, and to some who never did. Many years and many hundreds of students later, I cannot begin to express the depth of gratitude I owe to one remarkable seventeen year-old angel.
When I looked out at that sea of faces in French I so many years ago, I had no idea that one teenage girl would change my life and the life of each and every French student who walked through my door. That’s just the thing.
You don’t know.
And it matters.
They all come to you with something. Sometimes it’s in their background, and sometimes it is something yet to be. But they all have the ability to inspire and to be inspired. Every single one of them.
Merci Juliette. Tu m'inspires.
So I wrote him up. He probably got detention for cursing, and we all moved on.
I didn’t think any more about Greg until four years later when my sister’s little boy, Alex, was diagnosed with cancer. I would spend sleepless nights in the hospital with him and my sister and then leave straight for work in the morning, showing up and pretending to care about teaching 8th graders how to conjugate irregular French verbs. Day after day, week after week, I’d look bleary-eyed at the kids in the room until one morning, I looked out and saw Greg.
“They don’t know what your life is like,” he said.
I woke up that day as a teacher. I realized that we all show up in class with our “stuff,” and it affects everything we do and everyone we encounter, from our colleagues down the hall to the 140-plus kids we see every day. We show up with custom baggage and so do the kids. The grownups somehow push it to a corner and carry on. But the kids, sometimes they unpack it right there at their desks, and they sort through it while everyone watches. And other times, they just hold it tightly to their chests, possessive of their pain and fearful that someone might take away the one thing that feels familiar.
Four years too late to do him any good, Greg reached out and demanded that I look at him. He pleaded with me to meet him both academically and emotionally, to be in the moment with him because that's the only common ground he might concede. Greg spoke for all the other kids when he whispered, "You might not be able to take away our baggage, but you can at least give us a place to put it down long enough to breathe."
So I spent the next eight years trying my best to be there for my students so they could learn. I was moving along pretty well, enjoying my job and loving the kids. I even spent some time with Nepali children in the Peace Corps. Just when I thought I had figured out this thing called teaching, the universe decided to show me how little I knew.
Everyone says to teachers, “You never know which kid you’re going to affect.” What they don’t tell you in teaching school is that you never know which kid is going to affect you.
In 2006, we were promoting French 1 at Milton High School. About sixty students expressed an interest in taking the class but at the last minute it became clear that the scheduling wouldn’t work. To my disappointment, only two students from the entire group were able to sign up. One of the girls, a rising junior, took a liking to French. She was a star. . . and sweet and kind and everything a teacher could wish for in a student. She became fast friends with a small group of kids who loved anything and everything French.
And half way through the school year, something went horribly wrong.
By summer, we all knew that Courtney had cancer. She might have chosen to go to Paris for a wish trip had the opportunity arisen, but she became too ill, too quickly. Chemo and surgery and radiation began to take their toll. We organized a limo to bring Courtney and two friends to a French restaurant and on a shopping spree, a small dose of happiness for a girl taking too many doses of everything else. Courtney spent most of that summer as a cancer patient confined to her bed and to hospitals, too sick to rise or to eat; yet on that one beautiful evening, three teenage girls showed Atlanta what it meant to be young.
Each time I saw Courtney that summer, her faith grew quietly stronger as her body grew progressively weaker, her spirit more remarkably determined than would seem possible given her physical reality. I suppose if I had known to look, I might have caught of glimpse of wings.
I wanted so much for Courtney to realize her dream of going to Paris. One day, my mom came home and told me she had seen a café table that I might like. For years, I had wanted to transform my whole classroom into a café. In fact, my students in New York called my classroom, “Café Steinhauer.”
So I thought about Courtney, and I thought, “If she can’t go to Paris, then maybe we can bring Paris to her.”
And if not now, when?
Over the course of the summer, through the generosity of my mom and Courtney’s parents, my classroom would eventually become a kind of a tourist destination: nineteen café tables and a little corner of Paris at Milton High School. Courtney had a place waiting for her at her very own French café when she briefly returned to school for her senior year. The City of Light never burned as brightly as when our "Juliette" came to class.
Fall and winter marched on as they must. We gave thanks at Thanksgiving and believed in Christmas miracles and rang in the New Year with a singular prayer in our hearts. Our days passed "more swiftly than a weaver's shuttle" as I have read in the book of Job.
Courtney left us in the spring of 2008. Her café has brought joy to students at Milton and Riverwood High Schools and now to those at Hopewell Middle School. Her courage, her faith, and her love of life continue to be a source of strength for me, to all those who knew her, and to some who never did. Many years and many hundreds of students later, I cannot begin to express the depth of gratitude I owe to one remarkable seventeen year-old angel.
When I looked out at that sea of faces in French I so many years ago, I had no idea that one teenage girl would change my life and the life of each and every French student who walked through my door. That’s just the thing.
You don’t know.
And it matters.
They all come to you with something. Sometimes it’s in their background, and sometimes it is something yet to be. But they all have the ability to inspire and to be inspired. Every single one of them.
Merci Juliette. Tu m'inspires.
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In loving memory of Courtney Mogan Doyle
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If you would like to hear "Juliette" Speaking French, there are some audio clips below.
I feel so blessed that these files were spared when my computer was re-imaged.
I feel so blessed that these files were spared when my computer was re-imaged.
 In loving memory of Courtney Mogan Doyle
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Click to leave a reflection.
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Check back here every once in a while...I hope to add links to the tables
above that will show you something magical. It will be a surprise every time.
above that will show you something magical. It will be a surprise every time.
