Me and the kids from Taylorville, Ill.
A teacher's call during COVID-19 triggers a relationship that's now four years old
Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.
—John Lennon
OUR RELATIONSHIP bloomed four years ago this week like that first daffodil wriggling from the mud and cold of winter. I call it “COVID Spring.” March 2020. Dark times.
In Taylorville, Illinois, a farming community of 10,700 in central Illinois, Cathy Schaeffer, a sixth-grade teacher at St. Mary Catholic School, was desperate to find ways to keep some sort of connection with her class. Keep the students thirsty to learn. Keep them feeling part of something instead of drifting away in pandemic space.
“They sent us home on March 13—Friday the 13th—with no indication when we’d be coming back,” remembers Cathy, 57 at the time. “We’d heard it could be up to two weeks. At our school, sixth grade is the end of the road, the year when kids are treated to an array of experiences like field trips. But not this year.”
In time to come, desperation would fuel all sorts of virtual experiences: instead of a trip to a local Italian restaurant, Cathy enlisted other teachers to “adopt” two or three of her students and hand-deliver them Italian dinners provided by the restaurant, Angelo's. Instead of their annual religious retreat in the woods, the class did it online, with help from a virtual canoe-paddling app. To teach her students how to plot an ordered pair on a coordinate plane—think of the board game Battleship—she created one with chalk in her driveway. On her hands and knees, she drew it, and videoed it for the kids.
“Unbeknownst to me, my elderly neighbors across the street were observing me from their living room window as I crawled on my hands and knees,” she says. “They were concerned I had fallen and couldn’t get up.”
Amid this craziness—at one point Cathy’s living room had become a command center with three computer screens—she reached out to me, a stranger. Years before, in searching for a gift to honor one of the priests at the school who loved the Frank Capra movie, she had come across my book 52 Little Lessons from It’s a Wonderful Life. Back in 2013, she had begun reading the class chapters from the book, which offers bite-sized life lessons extracted from the movie. For example: “Underdogs Matter,” “Sometimes You Just Gotta Dance” and “Don’t Wait to Tell Someone You Care.”
The kids not only heard the chapters, but discussed the lessons and, at Cathy’s encouragement, made shadow boxes based on their favorite scenes.
One student’s shadow box featured George’s confrontation with Mr. Gower, the druggist.
Now, with COVID tightening its grip, she lamented not being able to gather the students to read them the final 35 chapters of the 52-chapter book.
Wait. What if I record myself reading each chapter, then make the file available so the kids could listen to the life lessons?
“It seemed like something that would require permission,” she says.
So, she hunted down my email and wrote me. Flattered, I was more than happy to grant permission; nobody had ever approached me with such a request.
The more we talked, the more I realized how desperate Cathy and her class were to find some sense of normalcy.
“Is there anything else I can do to help?” I asked.
She thought for a moment. “Well, would you be willing to let the kids interview you—on Zoom?”
“Of course!”
So, a few weeks later, I did my first Zoom with Cathy Schaeffer’s sixth-grade class in Taylorville, Illinois. I talked about how what got me interested in writing was a Tudor Tru-Acton electric football game that, when it broke, inspired me to imagine my own games—and write stories about those games. I wanted to be a sportswriter.
In one online connection, I shared the beat-up electric football game that inspired my writing.
“How did you feel when you wrote your first book?” asked Jacob Kellerman.