The Teacher I Never Had

I thought I became a teacher to give my students what I had missed. It turns out I was carrying more teachers into the classroom than I realized.

Yesterday, I became a mechanechet.

And since then, my brain has apparently decided that sleep, moderation, and reasonable expectations are no longer necessary.

I have ideas.

So many ideas.

Things I want to try. Conversations I want to have. Ways I want to structure the classroom. Ways I might reach one boy, and then another. And another.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I keep telling myself:

Gruny. Calm down.

You are still an English teacher. You still teach what feels like a million other classes. You are still an event planner. You are still grieving. You are still trying to figure out how to live the rest of your life.

This is one small class.

Except I know myself well enough to know how completely useless that conversation is.

Once I decide that I am in, I am in.

There is no halfway version of me.

Until now, my official role in the yeshiva has been morah miktzo’it — a subject teacher. I teach English. My responsibility, at least officially, is the subject: curriculum, assignments, tests, grades.

But I have never really known how to teach that way.

From almost the first time I walked into a classroom as a teacher, I had a sentence in my head:

Be the teacher you never had.

For years, I believed that was why I taught the way I did.

I’m not sure I believe it anymore.

I went to Beis Rivka. I grew up with an incredibly strong Chabad identity, and with it came an almost unreasonable belief that I could do anything.

I don’t mean that metaphorically.

Somewhere very deep inside me is the conviction that if something needs to be done, I can probably figure out how to do it.

That came from my Chabad education.

I grew up learning that the Rebbe expected something from us. And the women I saw around me certainly weren’t taught to wait quietly for someone else to make things happen.

They built.

Schools. Programs. Organizations. Communities. Families.

They taught. They organized. They led.

I grew up understanding that men and women had different roles, but I don’t remember ever understanding “different” to mean “less.”

And yet, there was another part of my education.

Because in school, I often didn’t feel seen.

I didn’t feel like the adults around me saw my potential. Sometimes I felt the opposite. I felt underestimated. Diminished. As though people had decided what I was capable of before I had been given the chance to find out for myself.

That stays with a child.

Apparently, it stays with a teacher too.

So when I began teaching, I told myself I would be different.

I would be the teacher I never had.

I would see the kid in the back of the room.

I would notice the student who had already decided he was stupid.

I would find the kid whose grades were telling one story while something inside me suspected there was another one.

I would see them.

Except the older I get, the more I realize that the story I have been telling myself isn’t entirely fair.

Because I did have teachers.

I had some wonderful actual teachers and role models.

And I had teachers who never stood in front of a classroom at all.

Some people taught me by seeing me.

Some, perhaps, taught me because they didn’t.

And one of the greatest teachers I ever had was my Bubby.

My Bubby knew something about starting over.

She was left behind in Russia. Later she found herself in a displaced persons camp in France. She and my grandfather eventually went to Ireland, alone, and from there built a life in America.

And then, when she was 55 years old, my grandfather dropped dead.

He was 59.

People didn’t think she would get back up.

She grieved.

And then she did.

She stood up.

She worked. She built. She continued.

She worked practically until COVID, until the day she became sick.

For most of my life, I don’t think I understood that she was teaching me.

I just thought she was my Bubby.

Now I understand.

She was teaching me what strength looked like.

Not the kind of strength where nothing hurts you.

The kind where something does.

And you get up anyway.

Maybe that is why I have such complicated feelings about the phrase “the teacher I never had.”

Because I had teachers everywhere.

I had a religious education that told me I was capable of changing the world.

I had a school experience that sometimes made me feel like the people immediately in front of me couldn’t see what I might become.

I had women around me showing me what it meant to build.

And I had my Bubby showing me what it meant to rebuild.

All of those things educated me.

All of them walk into the classroom with me.

And then my father died.

There is no elegant transition into that sentence.

There isn’t one in life either.

One minute, you are one version of yourself.

And then someone dies, and you discover that identity is apparently not as fixed as you thought it was.

I am a grown woman.

I have jobs. Several of them.

I teach. I plan events. I solve problems. People call me when they need answers. I am the person who is supposed to know what happens next.

And yet, since my father died, I keep thinking:

I’m an orphan.

It sounds ridiculous sometimes.

Orphan is a word that seems like it should belong to children.

But grief has made me feel like a child in ways I wasn’t prepared for.

I still think about calling my father.

I still have moments when something happens and my brain gets there before reality does:

I need to tell Abba.

And then I remember.

Maybe that is why I think about my Bubby differently now.

At 55, she lost her husband and somehow had to figure out who she was in a world where he no longer existed.

She got up.

I don’t think getting up meant she was okay.

I understand that now in a way I couldn’t before.

You can get up and still be shattered.

You can go to work and still be grieving.

You can answer emails, teach a class, plan a wedding, laugh at something funny, make dinner, solve someone else’s crisis — and still have some part of your brain quietly screaming that someone you love is dead.

Maybe strength isn’t the absence of any of that.

Maybe strength is carrying it with you.

And into the middle of all of this came a new school year.

My Rosh Yeshiva asked me to become a mechanechet.

“Homeroom teacher” is probably the closest translation, but it doesn’t really say what the word means.

A morah miktzo’it is responsible for a subject.

A mechanechet is responsible, in some way, for the children themselves.

My class is small. The boys have learning differences, and some have emotional challenges as well.

These are kids who may already know what it feels like to be measured by the things that are hardest for them.

Kids who may have sat in classrooms and watched other children understand something immediately while they didn’t.

Kids who may already have adults in their lives who have decided what they are capable of.

I know something about that.

And suddenly the sentence I have carried into classrooms for years feels different.

Be the teacher you never had.

Maybe that’s not the job.

Maybe the job is to take everything all of my teachers gave me — the ones who saw me and the ones who didn’t, the Rebbe and the women he empowered, my Bubby and the life she lived — and bring all of that into the room.

Maybe my job isn’t to decide what these boys can become.

Maybe it’s to refuse to decide too soon what they can’t.

I am not doing this alone.

There is a male educator working alongside me, someone who can provide what we call a d’mut shel rav — the figure of a rabbi that matters in a boys’ yeshiva.

I understand why he is there.

I want him there.

But his presence has also made me think about the woman I was raised to be.

I teach in a Chassidic yeshiva, but it isn’t a Chabad yeshiva. There are traditions and structures here that are familiar to me, and others that aren’t exactly the ones in which I grew up.

I am still figuring out how I fit inside them.

But I know this much:

I don’t interpret someone else’s place as requiring me to make mine smaller.

And I don’t think my school does either.

They know me.

They hired me.

My Rosh Yeshiva chose me for this position.

Presumably, nobody involved thought I was suddenly going to develop a quiet, understated personality.

So who exactly walks into that classroom every morning?

The English teacher?

The new mechanechet who has had approximately four thousand ideas since yesterday and desperately needs someone to confiscate her notebook?

The Chabad girl who learned that when something needs doing, you do it?

The woman shaped by the times she wasn’t seen?

The granddaughter of a woman who taught her that you can be devastated and still stand back up?

The event planner whose natural response to almost any problem is to make a spreadsheet?

The grown woman who takes care of everyone and everything?

The daughter who still wants her Abba?

Apparently, all of us.

And maybe that is what I am beginning to understand about education.

We spend so much time thinking about what we bring into a classroom to teach.

Curriculum.

Knowledge.

Experience.

Methods.

But we also bring every person who ever taught us who we are.

We bring the people who believed in us.

We bring the people who underestimated us.

We bring the people who loved us.

We even bring the people we have lost.

I walked into my new classroom carrying all of them.

And then I looked around at a small group of boys carrying their own invisible classrooms full of people and experiences with them.

I don’t know yet what kind of mechanechet I will be.

I don’t know which of my four thousand ideas will work and which will be spectacular failures.

I don’t know what these boys will teach me.

I don’t know what I will manage to give them.

And right now, I don’t entirely know who I am becoming either.

Maybe I don’t have to.

They are still becoming.

Apparently, so am I.

But I know one thing about myself.

I’m all in.