It Ain't Over (43 page)

Thinking about making a midlife career change, Marguerite had lots of ideas for what she could do next. Should she become a horticulturist? (She was
an avid gardener.) Work for a nonprofit? (She loved the idea of giving back.) Go to law school? (She liked the notion of doing pro bono work.)

Marguerite found her answer when a friend mentioned that she was volunteering at a small school on a nearby Native American reservation.

“This woman was even older than me—in her early seventies—and she was telling me how rewarding it was to work with these kids who were struggling to read,” Marguerite recalls. “She said their faces would light up when she walked in the door and she loved watching their progress over time. After so many years of dealing with demanding architecture clients and contractors, I was tired of focusing on buildings—I wanted to focus on people. And I don’t believe in waiting until you’re miserable to take a leap outside your comfort zone.”

Marguerite decided to dip a toe into teaching by taking every Monday off to volunteer at the Indian school. “I would read with kids who were way behind their grade level. It was clear they weren’t used to getting a lot of individual attention, but by the end of the school year, they’d say, ‘I got it! I understand!’

“I thought,
I’m doing this one day a week, and it’s my favorite day
. That experience really clinched it for me: I wanted to be a teacher.”

Marguerite knew it would be tough making the switch. “Friends said, ‘Is anybody really going to hire a 50-year-old teacher?’ But I knew I had the energy and enthusiasm to do this, and I didn’t want my age standing in my way.”

So Marguerite wrapped up the last of her architecture work and enrolled in a teaching certificate program at Antioch University, two hours away in Seattle. “I would get up before five, walk a half-mile to catch a bus to the ferry, ride the six a.m. ferry across Puget Sound to Seattle, then walk two miles to campus.” After taking classes all day, “I’d get home around six p.m., make dinner, help my two girls with their homework, then start on
my
homework after they went to bed, working past midnight.

“It was exhausting, but I absolutely loved it. Here I was, a student again after 30 years, going on field trips with my 20-year-old classmates. It was so much fun.”

After finishing her student teaching at the same Native American school where she had volunteered, Marguerite worked as a substitute before finally landing a position teaching fifth grade at her daughters’ old elementary school on Bainbridge Island.

“Subbing was tough. You don’t know what you’re walking into every day. And you have to figure out how to manage a class full of kids you’ve never seen before,” says Marguerite. “But once I got into my own full-time classroom, and was able to get to know the kids and exercise my own creativity in planning lessons, everything fell into place.

“Everyone remembers their fifth-grade teacher. It’s a rocky age for kids, but they have so much energy and curiosity it’s inspiring to see the wheels turning in their brains. And it makes
me
driven to learn new things, too. What’s the point of life if you’re not always learning?”

Marguerite regularly clocks 11 hours a day in school—plus nights and weekends grading essays and exams. “My husband asks, ‘Why don’t you just give them multiple-choice tests? They’re easier to grade.’ But I feel I owe it to my kids to give them more.”

And the kids give back. “I ride a motor scooter to work—I love the freedom of it, the wind in my face—but one day I had an accident and ended up in the ER. The principal said, ‘Let me get a substitute,’ but I said, ‘No, no, I can make it in! I have a big lesson planned today.’ So they patched me up, and I went on to school. When I walked into the classroom, with all of my cuts, scrapes, and bandages, the kids started applauding. ‘We can’t believe you came!’ It was so wonderful.”

While Marguerite appreciates the students who “you don’t have to worry about, who always do their work,” she has a soft spot—“an extra measure of
patience”—for the tough cases. “I feel like I have to look out for them, give them a little push to succeed.

“I will always remember one boy who had a communication disorder and couldn’t connect with the other kids. We were studying the Revolutionary War, and I had broken the class into groups to write and act out scenes about different moments from the war. I knew this boy couldn’t work in a group, so I said to him, ‘There’s a famous speech about liberty that Patrick Henry gave at the time. Why don’t you do part of that speech?’ He did—and his classmates gave him an ovation.

“I thought,
This kid will never forget this moment, I’ll never forget it, and most of his classmates will never forget it.
He had earned a measure of respect that hadn’t been there before.”

A few years later, Marguerite was teaching a lesson on poetry when a boy named Brian, who had a similar condition, read a verse he had written about visiting his dad, who had moved to another part of the country.

Extremely hot

a summer day in Arizona

waking up

weary eyes

knowing what I would face

out the window I looked

desert

mesas

pool

Bags were packed

Dad was ready

to his car I went

we talked of great experiences

we were as happy as clowns

I hugged my Dad

a tear drop fell,

a raindrop after a drought

Dad drove

more tears came

When will I see him again?

When he finished, the class was stone silent. “What he had written was so moving. You often don’t realize what’s inside these kids. His classmates had been hard on him for years, so he had just clammed up. With so many of my students, I
know
they’re going to go on and be successful. Then there are a handful about whom I’ll think, years later,
I really hope he’s doing okay.
And Brian is one of them.”

At the end of one recent school year, as the kids in her class were crowding around one another’s desks to sign yearbooks, Marguerite noticed one girl who didn’t have one—only a blank piece of paper for her friends to sign. “When I asked her about it, she said, ‘We couldn’t afford a yearbook this year.’ This is a sweet girl who would bring me roses from her mom’s garden, or show up on Monday with a cookie she’d baked over the weekend.”

At lunchtime, Marguerite went to the school office, where she was able to pick up an extra yearbook. “When I gave it to this little girl, she said, ‘It’s
mine
?’ She hugged me so tight, you would have thought I’d given her a million dollars.”

“I know that teachers complain about salaries, but on days like that, I sometimes think I should pay the school. How could you not want to experience seeing that change on someone’s face?”

On the first day of school last year, Marguerite found a letter in her mailbox from a former student. “He said that last year in my class was the best year of his life and he was going to miss me. He had drawn a picture of a big rock with fireworks coming out, and wrote, ‘You rock, Mrs. Thomas!’ It’s those kinds of things—the notes, the poems, the artwork left on my desk—that remind me that I’m really making a difference in these kids’ lives.”

Lori Cheek
: Photograph by Guest of a Guest

Natasha Coleman
: T Nikole Photography by Tara Allen

Heather Femia
: Photograph by Malek Naz Freidouni

Kerry O’Brien
: Michael Sipe Photography

Sue Rock
: Photograph by Anderson Zaca

Susan Porter
: Photograph by Aamir Malick

Layla Fanucci
: Photograph by Chick Harrity

Julie Lythcott-Haims
: Photograph by Dan Haims

Kristine Brennen
: Photograph by Alison Caron/Alison Caron Design

Mari Ann Weiss Cater
: Photograph by Gabriella Valentino

Troy Ball
: Photograph by Rachael McIntosh

Lee Gale Gruen
: Photograph by Audrey Stein

Veronica Bosgraaf
: Photograph by Grooters Productions

Laura Treloar
: Photograph by Michelle Werner

Amy Knapp
: Photograph by Alan Gawel/Main St. Portraits

Lois Heckman
: Lisa Rhinehart/Rhinehart Photography

Jennifer Otter Bickerdike
: Photograph by Ali Astbury

Ofelia de La Valette
: Photograph by David Rams

Mary Waldner
: Photograph by Casey Darr

Cinnamon Bowser
: Photograph by
Brooklyn Avenue Journal

Robin Béquet
: Photograph by Janie Osborne

Roxanne Watson
: Photograph courtesy of Montefiore Medical Center

Marguerite Heard Thomas
: Photograph by Annie Thomas

All other photographs in this book were acquired from the subjects of the stories and are reprinted with permission.