Last spring, teachers were heroes because they did the impossible when the pandemic shut the world down.

Educators started inventing ways to teach online when in-person classes were abruptly stopped.

Literally overnight, they had to figure out how to teach music, art, and biology through a computer screen.

Hours were spent modifying lessons for online use, posting those lessons and partnering with parents to complete the school year.

This year, schools decided to offer both in-person and remove learning, but administrators did not realize the huge burden they were putting on teachers.

Imagine teaching 20 fidgety students on a Zoom session while keeping an eye on the 10 who are sitting in your classroom.

Can’t ignore the online students.

Can’t ignore the ones sitting right in front of you.

And administrators are blaming you for students who didn’t bother to show up and for failing grades.

In the spring, YouTube videos flourished with parents realizing how they’d taken for granted the difficulties educators faced every single day.

Unfortunately, those brief few weeks when the world thought educators were heroes didn’t last long.

The lessons teachers learned about themselves, however, will last a lifetime.

You can accomplish more than you ever thought possible.

If you handled an online class while simultaneously teaching in person, nothing can stop you. You reached deep into your tool box to teach, and you did so with grace.

You learned you will always be asked to do the impossible by those without a clue as to what you do.

Parents should’ve realized teaching requires intelligence, patience and the skills to teach a difficult subject to all the different learners in the class.

Administrators should’ve learned to think twice before assigning ridiculous paperwork to already overworked teachers, especially a supervisor who has not stepped foot in a classroom in more than three years.

You taught every single day to students wearing masks while you had to wear one as well. A teacher knows whether or not a student is learning by the discouraged or triumphant look on their face.

Eyebrows don’t tell that story.

The community demanded ridiculous goals from you and, to make things worse, the powers that be decided it would pay exorbitant fees to testing companies to tell parents what you could’ve told them for free – kids are not where they’re supposed to be.

Teachers have the answer:  let educators teach students instead of teaching to a test and they’ll all be caught up in 12 weeks.

But the year wasn’t a total wash. Students learned something about teachers.

They learned their teacher would endure anything to make sure their students received a good education.

Teachers demonstrated when life blows up in your face, you gather up the pieces and keep going.

They learned they can count on their teacher to never give up on them.

Despite being exhausted, both physically and emotionally, teachers will spend the summer getting ready.

They’ll hang curtains in the classroom, create cozy reading corners and sit through online lectures to improve their teaching methods. They’ll have an online back-up plan ready just in case covid sweeps the country again.

They’ll do all of this knowing the community does not fully appreciate or respect them despite knowing how hard their job is.

They’ll do it despite knowing they’re not being paid what they’re worth.

They’ll do it because they love being an educator. They love your kids. They live for that one moment when a student’s face says “I got it.”

Teachers, you survived.

And if no one’s told you lately, thank you for never giving up.

Thank you for the generous heart you bring to your students.

Thank you for doing the impossible in an impossible year.

Forget Superman and Wonder Woman. The real superheroes are in our classrooms. They wore a mask instead of a cape.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald. 

This week, the Class of 2021 will finish up their high school careers a lot differently than what they imagined when they started.

Their freshman and sophomore years were what we see on television – lively pep rallies, exciting football games, and first loves.

Last year, their traditional path was blown to bits.

Schools did their best to celebrate those seniors and spent the summer preparing for a year where no one knew what was ahead.

Almost every day was a new administrative hurdle, and the year started with mandatory masks in the classroom and scrambling to find internet access and laptops for virtual learners.

Students spent the year in front of a computer screen by themselves or sitting in almost empty classrooms while wearing a mask for eight hours.

It would be easy to feel sorry for these teens. They lost a year they can never get back, but they also gained more than any other class has in the last 50 years.

They found resiliency. These teens attended classes despite not being able to see their friends’ or teachers’ smiles.

They learned. They wrote the dreaded English research paper, debated the pros and cons of the American Revolution, either in person or on Zoom, and dissected a frog, either virtually or in the classroom.

They learned to live with uncertainty. No one knew how bad the coronavirus was going to be, especially with cable news outlets broadcasting the daily death toll every minute of every day.

No one knew if they’d have classes or athletic events, yet these teens still decorated banners and posters for the halls.

They matured. Social media is full of “Karen” videos where grown-ups refused to wear masks in stores and made the lives of minimum-wage employees miserable.

Teens working in retail and the food industry learned to take the verbal assaults of these militants and held their ground with maturity and a calm most of us could never achieve.

These teens learned they can obey rules that seemed overkill to them at their invincible age and still get the education they needed.

They learned responsibility. Those who checked in for their virtual classes on a regular basis earned their grades.

Those learned they could take care of their own lives without an adult looking over their shoulder. They found the answers when struggling with homework at 2 a.m. and found creative ways to complete group projects.

There were many who didn’t step up. They did the bare minimum, seldom checked in at school or spent the past year playing video games.

A huge number of teens grew discouraged or were overwhelmed with taking care of younger ones at home and let their studies slide.

There will always be people who do not rise to the challenge – those people have been a part of every generation.

But for those who did what you had to do, congratulations. You now know you have the inner fortitude to conquer any task in front of you.

Class of 2021, hold your head up high when you walk across the graduation stage.

Whenever you face a tough situation in the future, remember you completed your senior year of high school, the year that was supposed to be one of fun, parties and celebrating your future, with dignity.

Be proud you didn’t crumble when the whole world was falling apart.

You persevered despite the overwhelming odds.

Nothing will ever stand in your way.

 

            Next week – a salute to teachers. This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald. 

 

Mother’s Day with my mom and family was a blast. Brother Jimmy and his crew boiled shrimp, crab and lobsters, and we had fun playing games and visiting with our delightful cousin, Amy, who flew in from New York.

We didn’t use fancy dishes or plates, and we didn’t worry about what we were wearing. The conversations never stopped as we reached over each other for paper towels and bowls of butter.

The best family shindigs are ones where we don’t worry about impressing anyone else. But so many times, we work ourselves into exhaustion because we think we must have a clean house in order to have a successful gathering.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the long list of “you musts.” It’s time for parents to shred that list.

Magazines and websites try to make us feel guilty if we’re not entertaining like royalty is visiting.

The shame they create is tough to resist because we all want to be the best at taking care of our families.

One area where we’re shamed is the laundry. It’s not enough for them that we wash and sometimes fold our clothes. Now they want us to do laundry stripping.

This requires people to soak clothes in a special mixture of borax, detergent and baking soda for six hours, rinse, refill the tub and soak the laundry for another six hours.

Who has 12 hours to devote to one load of laundry?

Who can tie up a bathtub all day long and who wants the back-breaking job of hauling all that wet laundry to the washing machine?

Not me. Cheap laundry sheets in the dryer will have your clothes smelling just fine.

Unless there’s someone in your family with severe allergies, forget dusting furniture. During the pandemic, I decided to dust the shelves in our living room. The last time I’d done that was eight years ago when we moved in.

No one, and I mean no one, has ever looked on those shelves and no one ever will.

Don’t beat yourself up because the tables in your bedroom have a fine coating of dust on them. My friend Pat has a great rationalization for not hauling out a can of Pledge – dust serves as a protective covering for furniture.

Check picking your child’s outfits off the list.

Years ago, our eldest son was participating in the Cub Scout Pine Wood Derby race. I went early to set up, and my husband brought our two youngest boys later.

The kids showed up in plaid pants, striped shirts, tube socks pulled up over their knees and full cowboy get up – boots, hat and holster. Dad and sons were proud of themselves for getting ready all by themselves.

I worried the other moms would judge me. But our kids had a blast, clomping around in their boots, waving their hats, and were confident in the choices they made.

Cooking a magazine-quality family meal is always on the mom guilt list.

Growing up, one of us spilled a glass of Kool-Aid every single meal. We ate from plates my mom got using stamps from Winn-Dixie, and we our drinking glasses were washed-out jelly jars.

To this day, my memories of family dinners is one of fun discussions, great food and knowing our family loved each other.

And that’s what moms really want – for their families to love each other.

Remember, you don’t have to be perfect.

It’s okay to have an unorganized pantry. It’s okay to have peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch and dinner.

It’s okay to have a bowl of plastic fruit on the table.

So sit back, shove the unfolded laundry aside on the couch and watch “Moana” with your kids.

Perfect is boring. I’ll take a messy, spur-of-the-moment life any day of the week.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald. 

We talk about giants in society.

They are the trailblazers, the ones who take huge risks and believe there’s no reason to live half a life.

They push limits and ride high in the saddle.

Bill Hartman was one of those giants.

We lost a titan this week, and the Texas newspaper world and the business community have both lost one of its greats.

A native Texan and Baylor graduate, Mr. Hartman wrote about the small-town communities where he lived and worked. He was much more interested in the youngster who earned a blue ribbon at the county fair than a big-shot politician.

He was involved in his community. According to the Fort Bend County Historical Commission’s Oral History project, Hartman served on the Rosenberg/Richmond Chamber of Commerce, the Rosenberg Rotary Club, the Economic Development Council, the boards of Polly Ryon Hospital and Richmond State School and was active with the Fort Bend County Fair.

Three generations of Hartmans served as president of the Texas Daily Newspaper Association.

He not only served as president of the Baseball Writers Association of America, he loved writing about the Astros from their press box. He prized his dogs and horses, and there were pictures and ribbons in his office reflecting a love of riding and competing.

When I started at this newspaper, I had no idea the owner had an office right next door. We seldom saw him, but we knew Mr. Hartman critiqued and read everything we published.

His keen eye for prose and style earned my respect, but I was also terrified of him.

The first time I got a letter from Mr. Hartman, my hands shook as I opened the envelope. My column was a good one, he wrote, and closed with “keep firing.”  I framed that note and kept it over my desk for years.

When I criticized a big box store in town, he sent me an email – next time, include the offending company’s name.

Call ‘em out when they do right and nail ‘em when they do wrong was the message.

He was an outstanding writer. For years, he covered the Masters Golf tournaments from the sidelines, just as he did the Astros.

Well into his 70s, Mr. Hartman wrote a popular weekly Sunday column, “Sunday Slants,” and I loved reading about his family, the people he admired and the causes he championed and condemned.

There was no guessing where Bill Hartman stood on an issue, and he was never afraid to call out the weasels in public office and those who tried to slide underneath public decency.

He was an outstanding editor. Years ago, Lee Hartman asked me to write a story about a deaf baseball player on his son’s team. The father was also deaf and Lee thought the story was one I’d like to write.

Before the story was published, Lee said his dad wanted to read it first. I sweated and inspected every word in that feature story. I sent him a final draft and was shaking when I saw the editing marks on the page. All the changes Mr. Hartman made were absolutely right on the money. He trimmed the fat so the prose was lean and accurate. The parts he cut needed to go as they detracted from the main story.

I still have the marked-up page and reference it as to how to make a story pop off the page. The lesson – keep my eye on the heart of the story.

As the years passed, Mr. Hartman and I formed a friendship. He insisted I call him “Bill,” and I would but I was never comfortable doing that.

You see, Bill Hartman was a man who earned the esteemed title of “Mr.”

There are few people these days who can point to a lifetime of service to their community and a commitment to small-towns that are the country’s lifeblood. His many newspaper’s main directive was to cover those communities with dignity and thoroughness. Never forget the little guy and gal counted.

My condolences and prayers are with the Hartman family. Your dad and grandfather loved you all and left an enviable legacy in capable hands.

Keep firing, bh.

You’ll be missed.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.