I guess, as a teacher, I always felt more at home and comfortable with boys. The problem was, and it’s mine, that I worried so much about the girls.

I hope they understand now, as women, how much it meant to me to teach them, to give them just a little confidence, and how much their humanity meant to me. They were two thousand precious and irreplaceable surrogate daughters.

I hope they understand, too, the burden I’m putting on them in how much I trust them to redeem the damage older people like me—our childhoods littered by acres of gifts beneath tinseled Christmas trees and our childhood heroes blown apart by gunshots—have endured and have inflicted. We’ve left a terrible bill to pay.

But they, the two thousand young women I’ve taught, may understand, I hope, from my teaching that we’ve been here before as a people, and that we’ve paid similar bills, healed similar hurts, and come out stronger than we were before. From the history I’ve been taught, I am constantly moved at how much women have moved us along, no matter how painful the moving can be. I am moved today by how many women are running for office.

I’m to speak to middle-grade students next month. I’m going to use what I’ve learned from World War II to remind the girls (and, just as much and even more, the boys) in 4th and 5th grades that it’s women who have so selflessly redeemed us before. I hope some of the children blush, if only for a moment, when they realize that it’s the little girls among them who will grow up to accept such terrible greatness.

 

In the link below, some images of women who’ve accepted their inherent greatness.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14Ahf8ijpjm8G02W9mn-NS_heHlwMmmSv/view?usp=sharing