If you don’t like children, don’t be a teacher.

If you don’t like children, don’t have any.

Where are the happy families?

They still exist.

When I was teaching, I liked including the parents. Education can be, should be a family affair. I became part of the family, of so many families. They invited me to dinner. They accompanied field trips. They came to meetings and spoke up and out.

We were friends. Our Christmas card exchange was no token effort. We wrote to each other and shared our lives.

Year by year my family grew and became a community. Parents met other parents and joined in common purpose, became friends on their own and the whole world got better for everyone.

The success of one was shared by all.

Of course there were hold-outs. There were parents who were sorry they had children. One student told me in a writing exercise, “If only my father cared about me 1/10 as much…”

I know, you can’t win ‘em all. There are some nuts you can’t crack.

But we, I say we to include the children my students, working together, had great success in thawing out recalcitrants. Some parents just want a little recognition and inclusion. Some parents don’t know how to love their kids, or how to show it, and need to learn.

And some kids shut out their parents from their own (adolescent) world. They communicate with angry grunts.

I kept trying to find ways. If one didn’t work, I’d try another. I devised lessons that required parent participation, and the parents shared the high grade, the pleasure of victory winning praise.

Not all, but many, families grew closer. I welcomed them and they welcomed me.

They saw the love I have for everyone, and it often worked to start their engines, sometimes shamed them into realizing what’s important. Sometimes marriages on the verge of breaking up, healed and stayed together.

Children who thought they had no future, graduated, went to college and found a life, and the parents discovered family pride.

And I was just a classroom teacher, still learning myself how to make things better, my teaching, the world.

I tried to balance humility with the satisfaction of earned success.

All of which is to say that it can be done. Should be done. Must be done.

I’ve reduced the words to one, love. More than twenty years out of the classroom, I’m still teaching that word.

And teachers, we teachers, my beloved colleagues, can save the world.

The world is our classroom.

And there’s more than one of me.