Mrs. Brischetto’s breath reeked of coffee and cigarettes. Her face was inches away from mine, infuriated eyes glaring behind huge glasses. Frustration settled in every wrinkle on her face and her arms flailed in the air. My second grade classmates gathered around my desk watching me shrink smaller and smaller into my chair. My math book sat opened on my desk and I stared at it blankly. The unfriendly shapes and words started to blur together, creating a soup of ink on the page. I don’t remember what my teacher screamed but her words were slicing me to pieces. They belittled me, taunting me on my inability to figure out the math problem. She had explained it to me over and over. I just didn’t get it. I felt stupid, embarrassed and more than anything I wanted some space. Space to collect my thoughts, to regain my dignity. I also wanted to cry but something held back the tears: the anger boiling inside of me. To this day, I remember wanting to flip over my desk and run out of class, away from that barren room with little color, from the cracked tile that snaked throughout the old school building. Away from her.
That day started a life long hate of math. I’ve never been good with numbers and that was obvious from an early age. But my deficiency, I now realize, goes beyond a skill I’m not good at. Mrs. Brischetto was an old school educator in Italy. She believed that children were to be herded like cattle. You sat them down, showed them how to do something and they’d move along to the next thing. When I didn’t fit that mold, she couldn’t deal with it. Her angry words struck me harder than any hand could, planting the seed that told me I wasn’t smart, that I would never learn math. Her fury and disappointment launched a life long panic every time I walked in a math room. I would start each semester just knowing that I’d fail, that I’d flunk each test, that the teacher’s lectures would sound like ancient Latin. And I did fail, very often.
Looking back to the foundation of my fear, the seed that grew to become a tree of negative self-esteem was the outcome of a terrible student-teacher relationship. I was a painfully shy and insecure child and starting school at five years old, a year younger than the rest of my peers, presented a huge emotional obstacle. My early encounters with Mrs. Brischetto gave me a profound distrust of teachers. Mostly, it gave me a fear to learn. Slowly, that low self-confidence bled into other areas of my life. I just thought that I was never going to be good at learning, that it would take too long, that I’d have to work too hard, to truly excel in school. It took me several years to understand that no one learns the same.
A student-teacher relationship can impact a child with long-term feelings. The American Psychological Association says “Students who have close, positive, and supportive relationships with their teachers will attain higher levels of achievement than those students with more conflictual relationships.” Unfortunately, not everyone who chooses this profession understands this truth.
There are many jobs that require a true humanitarian heart, a love for people and for kids, and a gentle spirit. A doctor, for example, needs to remember that a person is much more than a body with organs, but also an individual led by a spiritual soul. He or she needs to understand the delicate foundation that makes us human beings, that tugs our heart strings, that makes us whole. But none other will ever come close to the most important job of all: Teacher. The person who spends more time with a child than her own parents do; the one who can identify immediately the boy abused at home; the person who sees his blank face as shame for not being able to learn like the other kids; not indifference. The leader, the molder, the second Mother or Father. The one person who can affect a child for the rest of his or her life.
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