By Mark

Caretaker, keeper, steward, guardian. One who protects, maintains, facilitates. Teachers are custodians of our children and thus our future. I strive to be a good custodian.

Someone else who strives to be a good custodian–a true caretaker, guardian, and steward–is the woman who I pass most days after school as she pushes her cart down my hallway. Of course, she is my building's janitor–a custodian by all the definitions. 

So I came into school Tuesday morning to a note on my desk from my custodian.

It seems that some obnoxious freshman (my adjective, not hers) had vandalized the locker bay bathroom in a particularly repulsive way and she had been charged to clean and disinfect. This took longer than she had expected. She had left the typewritten note on my desk and the desks of my hall neighbors to apologize for not being able to vacuum my room as she was scheduled to do. 

At the beginning of the period, I shared her note with my first period class. When I mentioned that our custodian had apologized to us, their first reaction was to volunteer to seek out and beat up those freshmen for making our custodian have to clean up their mess (I counseled them out of this impulse, heartwarming as a threat of bodily harm can sometimes be). It turned out that just about all of my students also knew our custodian by name–all of them responded with smiles and jabbering-on about this time or that when she'd visited with each of them in the hallway. That she felt she needed to apologize earned an intense reaction many of the kids.

As the class period was about to end, I asked them to check the floor like I do every period and thanked them for picking up any trash even if it wasn't theirs. My entire class disappeared (not an ounce of hyperbole here: every single one of the thirty-two sometimes self-entitled, sometimes surly f-bomb-dropping, sometimes frustratingly hard-to-deal-with 17- and 18-year olds), they each disappeared instantly under their desks to pick up even the tiniest scrap–in some cases locating palmfuls of those annoying little t-shaped papers shed so easily from spiral notebooks. One girl made a comment that I later used with my other classes: "Her job might be to clean the room, but she shouldn't have to clean up after us. There's a difference."

I believe that people know to do what is right. I believe that people appreciate being taken care of–especially when there is true and intentional care. And I believe that people, even adolescents who themselves are not quite yet real human beings, appreciate when they see someone who takes pride in her work. Sometimes we need a reminder of the things we take for granted…things like a good custodian to take care of us.

Let's not forget who else is a good custodian of our childrens' education.