Lisa is a high school English teacher. She is the kind of teacher that every parent wants for their child. She takes her job very seriously and makes it a point to have meaningful relationships with each of the students that walk into her classroom. But in recent years there has been an overwhelming number of books being banned for educational use and that has affected Lisa's ability to do her job. She looks at banned books as a way to remove the existence of students from living on pages because she recognizes that those pages may be the only place that those students see themselves. As an avid reader she shares with her students her passion for reading and literacy that was passed down to her from her mother. In her life experiences we see her not only as an educator but also as a daughter, and sister. The hope is that we will gain a better understanding of the challenges that people outside of the educational system put on top of those who have to work within it. The pandemic of 2020 and following years left so many students more isolated than they had ever been. For some it made an already dark world completely blackout. At the end of every day the only thing Lisa wants is for the 180 students that she teaches every day is for them to feel like they exist, they are important, they are heard, and above all else they absolutely deserve to live. A story about the fight that so many educators have fought and are having right now because it is difficult to understand why educators cannot just do for one, they must do for all.
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Have you ever had one of those conversations with your friends where they ask you the question, “What does a perfect day look like?” This is one of my favorite questions quite honestly and my friends aren't ever surprised by my response because it is pretty consistent. A perfect day for me is sitting on the beach or in a lawn chair or even by the pool and reading a book. That's it. I don't need to win the lottery, I don't need a steak dinner, though both would be nice. All I need is sunlight and the book. Ever since I was a child my mother drilled into us that education was important and the first part of education was literacy. As a kid I had no idea what literacy meant but the older I got the more I read the more I understood. I'm so thankful that's the type of teacher that my mother was. The kind that worked two jobs so that my sister and I would always have a bookshelf full of literature. Things that we would read once and never read again, things that we would read three times and hold near and dear to our hearts. That's also why I became an educator. I wanted my kids to be able to walk into a classroom and see the joy on my face and it would make them smile just because I was so happy to crack open a book every single day. I'm really good at what I do, damn good at what I do. The way that education has shifted I am starting to feel like so many characters that I've read in so many books, they don't make it to see the last page.