When I was student teaching in 2013, I was assigned to a challenging class of third graders, and learned quickly that trying to talk over them would only result in laryngitis. This would be especially true at times when I would bring them outside to play, so, I bought a cheap whistle, the kind that gym teachers use. For the record, those third graders eventually learned to listen better, and I learned a lot — a LOT — about classroom management on the fly from that experience. I’ve had that whistle ever since. It has come in handy in my more recent teaching years at my current job, where I’ve frequently had recess duty and occasionally filled in to teach gym class (kickball is about the extent of my expertise for that assignment!). It’s a dull black plastic whistle with a wooden ball inside, nothing special at all.

At least, it once was a dull black plastic whistle. Recently, when pulling my backpack out of the car one morning, it got caught and yanked somehow, and snapped off of the clip on my badge I wear around my neck. I didn’t notice until later that afternoon when I was back at my car, and what remained of the whistle after being run over several times lay in smithereens on the ground in the parking spot next to mine.

While I have any number of other items I could feel sentimental about, that whistle was something I may not have immediately considered as important at first. I hadn’t thought about its significance much in the grand scheme of things, until it was no longer around my neck and definitely no longer functional. That being said, if anybody can find meaning in the lowliest of everyday items, it’s me. And so of course I found lamentation where others might not. This is me we’re talking about after all.

I had a very hard time finding my footing in grad school; I never really did find it, in point of fact. Multiple very negative experiences combined with some mental health issues that came to a head at the time made for a very volatile situation in which I basically decided I couldn’t handle it. I switched programs for my final semester. While I earned my master’s degree in educational psychology, I graduated without acquiring certification to teach. I spent a very long time both during and then after grad school plagued by self-doubt. I felt passionate about teaching but very much in doubt about my abilities. I pivoted left into a job field I knew I could execute but never really enjoyed (because it wasn’t what I was meant for, I know now). I started teaching Sunday school to satisfy that passion and energy, but I believed for years that a full time teaching career wouldn’t happen for me.

But then it did. And when the time came in March 2021 that I had another unruly class of second and third grade youngsters who needed wrangling, who I had to take out to recess every day, I managed to find and bring that cheap plastic whistle out of retirement. It served me well at my current job for three years, until it died an anticlimactic death in the school parking lot last week.

It wasn’t just a whistle. It was a reminder that I could do the job, and do it well. That I could, in fact, handle it. That teaching in my own way doesn’t mean I’m teaching the wrong way. That I was, and am, in the right place.

It’s actually been an oddly sentimental few weeks, between losing this whistle and also walking through my old Sunday school classroom — my very first ever classroom — for the last time. (The building is being sold and we are now actively in the process of clearing everything out.) The nostalgia and crossroads-type feelings are real strong at the moment. But I digress.

I’ve had a number of people in positions above me who’ve been eager to shape me into the educator they think I should be. Those people have invariably been dismayed by my inability to fit the mold they try to set me in. One such person indeed once told me, eight years after grad school/four years into teaching Sunday school/over a year into my current full time teaching job that, “I’ll be a great teacher someday.” The idea was that this would be the case as long as I followed along with whatever absurd expectations they had for me. It was an absurd thing to say because I’d already been teaching for years, and it was a demeaning and diminishing thing to say, but luckily now it’s become a running joke among my colleagues and I.

The whistle was a reminder that there was indeed a time when I could believe in myself, that I could believe I would be a good teacher someday. Eleven years later, perhaps one could say that I’ve “made it,” that I’m not a novice at this anymore. Maybe, the loss of this whistle is a sign that “someday” is now.