The Everyday

After teaching high school for five years, I’ve learned a hard lesson: students don’t remember the things that I want them to remember. I’ve spent countless hours explaining the facts. I’ve explained the difference between participle and infinitive phrases, expounded on Hemingway’s terse prose and his effect on modern writing, and examined what makes To Kill a Mockingbird an American Classic. While some students managed to file some of these literary principles away in their brains, I’ve found that a majority of my students don’t look back at our time together and define it by the facts I’ve attempted to instill in them. They normally remember some semi-idiotic story I told about me and my high school friends, or they remember a piece of advice I gave them about their relationship with their high school sweetheart. Every year it seems like I have the same conversation with different students. They’ll tell me a story about something I don’t remember doing or saying, and we’ll have a good laugh about it. The conversation normally starts something like this:

“Hey, Mr. Isley, do you remember that time that you told our class that you wanted us to call you ‘The Boat’?”

Or, “Mr. Isley, remember the time you said that if we failed the grammar test, you’d quit teaching and become a manager at Chucky Cheese so that when we get older you can scare our children at their birthday parties for revenge?”

Or, “Mr. Isley, remember when the podium top came off and busted your lip during a test?”

My mind searches for the instance that they reference, and most of the time I come up blank, and they’ll fill me in on whatever it is that they remember about my class.

These semiannual conversations with my students got me thinking about how I remember people. And, like my students, most of memories of people are not the important stuff that most adults think define our lives. I remember the small stuff. The everyday. I look back on all the people who have had a major influence on my life and I remember an honest conversation, a small thoughtful gift or an inside joke.

Rich Whitman, my high school youth pastor, is a great personal example. I must have heard over 500 messages preached by him. Oddly, I don’t remember the specifics of more than ten of his sermons. It’s not because he was a poor speaker or because I didn’t listen and learn from them. I just tend to remember our personal experiences together. I remember sitting in his powder blue Chevy Cavalier in autumn having conversations about punk rock music. I remember playing Sardines in the Church during a lock-in. I remember telling him about my call to ministry in a Taco Bell over hard shell tacos with no lettuce. I told him that I wanted to spend my life teaching teenagers and he listened and shared some of his wisdom with me. If I were to be honest, I don’t even remember what he said specifically, but I’ve come to the conclusion that the words he said do not matter. What mattered was the attitude in which he lived his life.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to discount the power of words because I believe in the power and the necessity of language. God revealed himself through the written Word, which shows the power and the indispensable nature of language. And what my youth pastor said to me had a profound impact on my life. But what he said had to align with the language of his actions and the tone of his life. These elements had to correspond with each other to create something that has meaning thirteen years later.