Three Cheers for Teachers
Last night I met with my old creative writing teacher for dinner, and I reflected on just what an incredible impact she has had on my life over the many years since I left her classroom, We certainly can’t say that we deserve or have earned these kinds of teachers who make our lives exquisitely richer. All we can really do is be so grateful that we happened upon them and that they shared their powerful influence on us.
Last night I had great joy of meeting up a dear old high school teacher for dinner. This teacher had tremendous impact on me. It’s really made me think about what a profound difference teachers make in the lives of their students. Teachers absolutely change lives. And this particular teacher definitely changed mine in very important ways. She taught English, Mythology, and Creative Writing and she was also the advisor for the high school writing journal. And I think I took every single course she taught although it was never my intention to focus on English in college.
Beyond her singular excellence in teaching, she was even more impactful for me in the way she treated every student who entered her classroom with dignity and with the kind of high expectations that every student I think truly longs for even though they might not always enjoy the amount of effort it takes to live up to it. Isn’t it interesting that those teachers who demanded the most of us quite often are also our favorites? I don’t think that’s a coincidence at all. Those high expectations teach us that 1) we are capable of more than we sometimes believe and 2) we are worth the attention.
The amazing thing about these sorts of remarkable teachers is that they continue their important work despite the fact that almost no students have the words or the emotional and social maturity to recognize and verbalize their thanks sufficiently for these teachers going the extra mile when they are already metaphorically speaking asked to run marathons without shoes, water breaks, or sufficient training time. They keep at it for decades, nurturing fresh crops of students year after year with a keen curiosity of how each year will play out, hoping for a few students to truly embrace the material that means so much to them.
I’m so incredibly grateful that I’ve stayed in contact with this dear, dear teacher several years after graduation so I can appreciate and celebrate her amazing efforts after the fact at least. And even though it’s now been a couple of decades since I last took a class from her, last night she showed me that her commitment to, interest in, and excitement for my success and continued discoveries was evident in everything we talked about.
We certainly can’t say that we deserve or have earned these kinds of teachers who make our lives exquisitely richer. All we can really do is be so grateful that we happened upon them and that they shared their powerful influence on us. Whenever I hear criticism for teachers, I always reflect back on those early mornings walking into this special teacher’s classroom, filling a mug with herbal tea and hot water that somehow always seemed to be at the ready, finding a seat with a inspiring view of the mountain range outside the lead-framed windows, and meeting her intelligent, smiling face greeting me, inviting me to lean into the challenge and wonder of learning.
We don’t meet very many teachers quite like that, but I find it extremely admirable that anybody would follow the teacher’s track. They endure such long days, absorb so much of their children’s painful life stories, seek to inspire children who often are not very interested in what their teachers are trying to teach, and all of this while getting paid a meager salary under sometimes very rough conditions. I hope everyone has at least one of those teachers like the one I had the privilege of meeting up with last night. And what a gift to the world would it be to be a cheerleaders for our teachers and mentors for their students.