Good Morning

Image 1: Mrs. Kilmer's room.

                The classroom is plain, like any other classroom. The teacher’s desk sits in the front by the door, the old wood worn from years of use, and the drawers groan when they are opened. There are some posters on the wall, quotes from The Scarlet Letter, The Raven, and To Kill a Mockingbird. The shades on the windows are pulled down half-way, just enough for the room to stay cool in the summer, but to also to let a trickle of sunlight escape from the bottom. There’s no carpet on the floor, and smooth wood has tiny scratches from years of students walking in and out and desks being shuffled around. All in all, it seems a pretty average classroom, except for the old armchair in front of the teacher’s desk. This arm chair – a big, pink monstrosity of a thing – is the favored seat of Mrs. Judy Kilmer, the English teacher who taught in that classroom, in that chair, for years.

              Judy Kilmer stands at five-foot-nothing, a sixty year old woman with a sharp tongue and nerves of steel. She teaches English Literature, Journalism, and Creative Writing with passion and excitement, all the while engaging her students with stories of her life in the 70’s, filled with bra-burnings and protests. Every day she enters her room and says “good morning’ to her students, even when it’s two o’clock in the afternoon, and sits down in her armchair before starting class.      
            Mrs. Kilmer had wanted to be an English teacher since her third year of high school. When asked if anyone had inspired her to pursue this career, she smiled fondly and replied “Carol Kocher”, who had been her English teacher then. “I never wanted to do anything else,” she claimed. “That was it.”

                She currently works and West Scranton High, where she went to high school. “It’s still the same,” she says with a chuckle. She’s taught at several schools in the area over the years, including Riverside, Scranton Central (now Scranton High), and Scranton Tech. Still, West Scranton remains her favorite. “It’s home,” she says.



Image 2: Left-Scranton Federation of Teachers president, Rosemary Bland.
Right-Scranton School District Superintendent Dr. Alexis Kirijan.

          Being a teacher in the city of Scranton isn’t easy. The taxes are high, the budgets low, and the option of the profession is even lower. “People don’t like us ‘cause we’re in a union,” Mrs. Kilmer says. The teacher’s union of Scranton has been the butt of jokes in many political cartoons in Scranton’s newspaper, The Times Tribune (see image 2). It’s not a very high paying job, and the benefits aren’t great either. Despite that, Mrs. Kilmer claims to never have wanted to do anything else. “That was it for me,” she says, and her chest swells a little with pride. “I like my job. I would never do anything else.”

              Mrs. Kilmer enjoys the personal interaction she has with her students on a day-to-day basis. She tries to form a personal connection with each one, and many remember her fondly. She has attended graduation parties, weddings, and even baby showers of former students. To her, school should not consist of sitting at a desk and taking notes; it is so much more than that. “It’s educational, it’s spiritual, it’s social. It’s everything all at once,” she says earnestly. Students she has taught over the years still visit and ask for advice on politics, work, and life in general. She has made such an impact that some even visited her when she was in the hospital due to medical complications. She smiles softly when she says “a whole mess of kids came into the room one night with all these flowers and all these balloons, and that was very nice”. 

             Her approach to teaching differs from some. Rather than just sitting at her desk and having students copy notes, Mrs. Kilmer prefers to have in depth conversations with the class, and get all the students talking about their views and options. Though she has mastered this technique over the years, she recalls some incidents that didn’t end so well. “When I was younger, I used to like to sit on a desk, on top of a desk, and really get in there and teach. One time I was attempting to get off the desk, and I fell flat on my face." She laughs and shakes her head. "And the kids were hysterically laughing, but at the same time trying to pick me up.”

                Though Mrs. Kilmer is coming toward the end of her career as an educator, she doesn’t plan to leave the education system entirely. “I might run for school board,” she says thoughtful. She has been involved with the Scranton school board for many years already, and still believes that there is much work to be done, starting with the food. She recalls one student, a boy from Turkey, who refuses to eat the processed meals they serve in the cafeteria. “I have a kid now that doesn’t go up to the lunch room, so this is what I do; I go up to Wegmans and I buy him a box of these,” she gets up and fetches a box of fruit grain bars off the counter, “every now and again, and he sits every day and that’s what he has for lunch.” She also considers getting more involved with politics, and fighting to end the ‘No Child Left Behind’ program, which, in her opinion, seems to force students with disabilities like ADHD and ADD into regular classes that can’t provide the help they need. “It’s a nice name, but not a nice idea,” she claims. “Nobody’s winning there.”

Image 3: Mrs. Judy Kilmer, 2015

                  Close to retirement, Mrs. Kilmer often reflects on what she hopes her students will take away from her classes. “I want my students to realize that literature has been written to connect the dots of life,” she says. “I hope that they find themselves, and most of all I hope that they realize, too, that it shouldn’t be a rat race every day; there should be some happiness . . . I hope that they have a lifelong love of learning, especially of reading, you know? And that writing can sometimes be a real asset in their lives, even if nobody else reads it.” Even at the end, she has no regrets when it comes to being a teacher. “I found my career, as I’m starting to come to the end of it, the best choice I could have made. I’m doing exactly what I want to do, what I’m supposed to do, and I feel as though I make a difference . . . I could not be happier.”