When you’re smilin’
You cannot buy happiness, but you can buy smiles.
Two smile stories… When I taught US History years ago, my students were almost exclusively juniors. I liked that age group. They’re a lot more mature than underclassmen but not cocky like a lot of seniors. At the beginning of each year, I introduced the course and gave my students advice on how they could improve their college application resumes. I recommended they put in two solid years volunteering for a single nonprofit organization. Two years will show a sincere commitment instead of hopping each summer from one worthy cause to another. And I encouraged them to keep volunteering in college and beyond.
I shared with them my volunteering experiences as an adult. Things like coaching youth sports teams, peer counseling at church, etc. Then I added that I had an advantage over them. As an adult, I had a checkbook, and I could make donations to service and charitable organizations working to make lives better for those less fortunate.
To illustrate this point, I would show them brochure images from an organization that I support… Operation Smile. It was a steady stream of children horribly disfigured at birth. Those children were born with cleft palates, and in some rural villages overseas, those children were at best teased mercilessly or at worst ostracized by other villagers. The disfigured mouths and noses at times caused life threatening medical conditions. I followed those heartbreaking images with photos of the same children with huge smiles after receiving corrective surgery from the Operation Smile team of volunteer doctors, nurses, and support staff. Cost: $240.
Then I would make my pitch. If every student in each of my classes saved the money they would have spent on a single “foo-foo” drink at their local coffee store just once each month… each class could pay for a cleft palate operation at the end of the first semester. I let that thought sit there momentarily before moving on to my lesson plan.
A year or two after I started pitching my spiel about volunteerism and foreign children who needed smiles, near the end of the second semester, one of my students approached me. He told me that he had obtained a sellers permit so he could purchase items online then resell them for a small profit. It was a good way to make some walking around money. This year, after hearing my pitch about volunteering, he had set aside some money from his online sales. He handed me $240 and said he would like to pay for an operation to give a child a smile.
Wow! I was stunned. Such a giving heart… all I could do is thank him and smile.
The story does not end there…
The next year, just before Christmas, in my smallest class… 10 juniors… a student raised her hand and told me the class had something for me. Now, the families with kids at this school were very generous with teacher gifts especially around the holidays. I expected maybe a nice gift card… probably redeemable at a local coffee store.
Nope. Another one of my kids walked to the front of the classroom and handed me $240 in cash. Double wow! It was humbling to know that I had nudged these students to give a gift that would change a life. I wrote a check for the donation and put “From US History – 2nd Period” in the memo line and snapped a photo of the check before mailing it to Operation Smile. I used my photo of the check that acknowledged my 2nd period students’ selfless gift destined to create a smile where it was needed most as the screensaver on my classroom computer for the rest of the year.
Copyright © 2023 by Ray Fowler
