Mrs Harper

“The student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher.”  Luke 6:40 NIV

When I am on the road working, I have an ongoing conversation with my GPS.  It is voice activated so I don’t type addresses in, I say them aloud and can listen to directions as I drive.  When I run into road construction or an accident it tells me that it is “recalculating”.  It is not always very good at steering me around obstacles, but it will eventually get me back on course. 

I keep a short list of possible topics to write about.  One of those says “Guidance is not always around obstacles, sometimes it is right through them”.  I was thinking about this post today and a memory kept coming to mind.  When Jordyn started second grade, my wife worked at her school.  Early in the year, like maybe two weeks in, Jordyn’s teacher came in to tell Mary that we had a problem.  She said something to the effect of “she shouldn’t be here”, meaning second grade.  She told us that we had a lot of work to do.

It turned out that Jordyn had something called strabismus, which means her eyes were misaligned.  Eyes normally focus equally on an object.  Hers did not.  She also had a lazy eye, which means she had lower vision in one eye and when this happens the brain can ignore the lower functioning eye.  So, in effect, her eyesight was horrible. 

Hearing it all explained a lot of things.  For example, when she was learning to read, she would see a word and try to pronounce it and would add letters and syllables that were not there.  That sounds like any child learning to read, but we had not known that her eyes were at times looking at two different words and she was trying to say them as one and she thought it was normal.  I remember getting frustrated with her which was not my best parenting. 

We were blessed that year to find ourselves in the classroom of a teacher named Mrs. Harper.  She got to work and I do mean work.  She gave Jordyn extra work to do every night.  She gave her extra work to do every weekend.  At times Jordyn would get frustrated thinking the teacher didn’t like her, but she kept working.  We were taking steps to correct her vision at the same time but progress was slow. 

While I do not know much about teaching, I would have guessed that not many kids in second grade had to spend two hours or more on extra work – literally every day and every weekend – all year.  Keep in mind this was not just Jordyn doing the extra work.  The teacher was also doing extra work because there was no handbook she could open to pull out worksheets.  She was putting together extra assignments specifically aimed at Jordyn as we went.  It took her a lot of time too. 

Parent teacher conferences turned into the basic pattern of her saying “Here is what I am working on.  Here is what she is to work on.  Here is what mom and dad need to be working on.”  She updated those instructions on a regular basis.  It was a long, hard year.

Jordyn needed her to be demanding and she was.  But she needed her teacher to care about her for it to be effective and she most definitely cared.  By the end of second grade, Jordyn was reading at an appropriate level.  Her comprehension went up.  Her confidence went up.  She adjusted to the work.  When she faced her future, she was ready for it. 

It is not possible for me to thank this teacher enough for what she did.  Looking back it allowed Jordyn to just be her.  She did not struggle in school.  She did not always care about it much, but she was capable.  Without that teacher we would not have had the version of Jordyn that we ended up with.  The easy road, and maybe the normal road, would have been for the teacher to have put in a normal amount of effort and leave the rest up to us.  Instead, she pulled mom and dad right through it too and I still believe that year was one of the most impactful of Jordyn’s life. 

Do you ever wonder why God sends you through a mess instead of around it?  Me too.

Have you ever looked back on a messy period of your life and realized you are now blessed because of it?  Me too.

Challenge:  Sometimes Christians can sound like strong faith will put you on a journey around trouble or hardship.  However, God does not promise us easy.  He does promise that He will be right there with you, guiding you through the hard stuff.