My George Bailey moment

I had a George Bailey day yesterday.

George Bailey, of course, is the protagonist in the Frank Capra classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life” – a 1940s-era film set roughly during the Great Depression that makes an annual appearance on my television screen during the holidays.

A recap, for those who don’t know the story: George is a middle-aged businessman who’s led a less-than-exciting but responsible life and is suddenly, through no fault of his own, facing economic catastrophe and possible criminal charges for bank fraud. He starts thinking about ending it all – on Christmas no less. His guardian angel, Clarence, makes a sudden appearance and shows him what his town would have looked like if it hadn’t been for all his good deeds over many years.

The film ends with people from all across George’s life showing up at his home, offering donations to help cover the lost funds that were the source of his existential crisis, and everyone bursts into song.

Yes, it’s pretty sappy.

The coronavirus shutdown has made for a very weird end of my long teaching career. For six weeks now, I’ve been trying to deliver “distance learning,” and it’s not what I signed up for. As a younger colleague confided, it’s 10 times the work for one tenth of the satisfaction.

But despite the pandemic, my journalism students have been working hard to tell stories about what’s happening in our high school community, and our online news website has been abuzz with their words and photos. My journalism kids had been planning to put together one last hard-copy issue that would include a senior edition, an annual tradition in my program.

Unfortunately, we were out of cash.

I was planning to take 16 students to a national scholastic journalism convention in New York City right as the coronavirus crisis was ramping up. The convention was canceled, the school district banned travel, and my club account took a $10,000 hit for airfare and hotel expenses that we’re not getting back.

So in a Zoom meeting earlier this week, I finally had to deliver the bad news: I know you all want to produce one last issue, I said, but after I give out the refunds we owe to many of your families from the trip, the account balance is basically zero. That means – unless we figure out how to raise some money – we can’t print a final issue.

One student – only a sophomore but a young woman who is driven and focused and determined – said we should set up a GoFundMe fundraiser.

OK, I said, why not. It can’t hurt. But I wasn’t terribly hopeful.

I sent a memo to the principal and the English Department coordinator. You can have what’s left of the English budget, I was told, but it’s under $100. The principal said she’d see what she could do, but given the $12 million in pandemic-driven budget cuts my school district is considering, the odds weren’t good.

My sophomore sensation went ahead and set up the GoFundMe and sent me the link. I woke up the next morning and saw there had been a single $5 donation. I decided to donate, because I thought it was important to kick in if I was going to ask others to consider doing so. That got us to $105.

Then I shared it on my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and on the student newspaper and website social media accounts. I told my students to share it, so it went out on Tik Tok and Snapchat and who knows what else.

And then I spent the rest of the day in utter astonishment.

The donations just started to roll in – from old friends, from “newer” old friends, from former students, from the parents of former students, from journalism teacher colleagues sprinkled across the country, from journalist friends from my days of doing on-call copy editing at the Sacramento Bee, from parents of current students, from colleagues at my high school, from the spouses of colleagues, from people I don’t even know but who know the newspaper, the website and perhaps a kid or two who do the work to make it happen and wanted to support it.

And I just started crying. All day long, I’d go back and check the status of the GoFundMe account, see a name I recognized, and I’d start weeping again. (Yesterday was supposed to be a “grading day” for distance learning – not much of that got done.)

Part way through the day, I had a Zoom with Ria, the student who put this all together. We’d reached our initial goal of $2,000, and she asked if we should raise it.

I guess we should, I said. So we bumped it up by 50 percent. This morning, we’re almost there. We’ll be able to print a full issue, send it to every Granite Bay High School household and have a bit left over to renew some of our scholastic journalism memberships.

And I’m absolutely, utterly astonished.

Teaching is a funny business. It’s driven by content standards and curriculum goals and all kinds of other inside-baseball acronyms, but it’s ultimately about relationships. Yes, what you’re “doing” matters – can you shift those AP economics supply and demand curves the right direction? Can you gather sufficient sources and attribute them appropriately in that news-feature story? – but it’s really about the relationships between a teacher and his students.

So my job is to help students understand that it’s about more than just the content, the curriculum -- it’s about helping you realize I really do care about you and how you’re doing, and I’m in your corner to help you get there.

Which is George Bailey-level sappy, I know. But it’s why I’ve stuck around this business for almost 40 years.

Here’s the thing, though – students graduate. Off they go, launched into their futures, and for nearly 40 years I’ve quickly turned on a dime and refocused on the next batch of students coming my way. But yesterday, I finally understood why the tears were flowing down George Bailey’s face at the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

I certainly wasn’t facing an existential crisis like George – yes, we’re in a pandemic, but I’m still working, I’m getting groceries delivered and I’m healthy. My problem was just figuring out how to gently let my students know the coronavirus crisis was going to keep us from producing one last issue of their newspaper.

Coronavirus 1, Gazette 0. You’ll get ‘em next time.

But then, just like in the movie, a whole bunch of people showed up and said we’ll help.

And I realized more clearly than I ever have before that – just like George Bailey – the work I’ve been doing for nearly 40 years has mattered. It’s been important. People are thankful for it.

And that is an astonishing gift.