I was inspired to send an email to the faculty at my school asking them three simple questions:
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The rich collection of data was exactly what I had hoped for. Pat John, Glen Anderson, Madame Plastrik, Mrs. Dohn, Chandra Fernando, Mr. John Lee, Bob Chaplin, Sister Richard Marie, Mary Edson Nichols, Ms. Markell, Mr. Martineau are teachers remembered by teachers at my school. All of these teachers did influence the responders, representing preschool through high school levels, to choose their profession, and the characteristics admired the most centered on kindness, passion for her/his subject, fairness, and encouragement.
This past school year, a series of articles and books I read inspired me to focus on teachers remembering teachers. Here are a few excerpts from my reading.
Diane Lohr Wilson’s article “Mrs. Cremenski” in Independent School (Spring 2011) gave me a remembrance with this quote “I fell in love the first time with a woman. She was my junior year English teacher, Mrs. Tamara Cremenski. . . Her candor with us, this sense of collaboration and mutual respect, elevated me, along with my hard-working classmates, to a feeling of academic status that I had never before experienced.”
“I always think first of Phil Goff, my junior year English teacher at the Westminster Girls’ School in Atlanta. Mr. Goff was a brilliant lecturer and an unfailingly demanding and caring teacher. Even now, his intellectual gifts and his quips come rushing back to me; he had a gentle voice and was often funny when we least expected it.”1
Pat Bassett, president of NAIS, began his April 1, 2008, blog post: “A Message to Teachers… on Behalf of your Students” with “All students in the world deserve at least one teacher ‘who makes all the difference’ in their lives. Mine was Mr. Warren, my 11th grade United States history teacher, who took me on as a personal mission to engage me, and he succeeded — so much so that I wanted to be like him and become a teacher, and I did.”
Author and military brat Pat Conroy, who lived in the dark shadow of his Marine Corps father, was a voracious reader. In Chapter Three, “The Teacher” in My Reading Life (2010), he describes his love for a memorable teacher. “I wanted to attach my own moon of solitude to the strong attraction of a good man’s gravitational pull. I found that man by luck when I walked into Gene Norris’s English class in 1961. Though Gene couldn’t have survived a fistfight with any of the marines I had met, I knew I was in the presence of the exceptional and scrupulous man I’d been searching for my whole life. The certainty of this gentleness was like a clear shot of sunshine to me. I had met a great man, at last.”2 Pat Conroy eloquently wrote in his first book, The Water is Wide, his experience as a teacher.
For me, I think about Miss Mettling and Mr. Burke often. They have since passed away, but both have made an impression upon me, and they still do today.
My fourth period, high school geometry teacher, Mr. Burke was the one who changed the course of my life. Let me explain. I — and my parents — always considered that I was a decent math student, so when I hit Algebra I in my freshman year, why would anyone think that I would not do well. Other than the fact that there are many things to think about at the age of 14, an abstract form of math would be just another challenge to be conquered and surely an ace in my back pocket. By June of that year, I was thankful for the year-final “C-” grade I received. It was somewhere in the middle of the first semester of my sophomore year that I fell in love with geometry. Mr. Burke’s fatherly, methodical, approach made sense to me. Everything he colorfully chalked on the board was precise and beautiful. I wanted to be like him. I wanted to be a math teacher. How was I to know that I was a visual learner, and lines, shapes, and figures connected with my brain perfectly. Come June, I did not have to take my final exam because I had an “A” average. Who would have guessed that I would become a math teacher and the first time I would eventually teach geometry, my younger son would be in my class? Alas, he is a journalist, and has shied away from both math and teaching.
Whether it is because we are at a vulnerable point in our lives, or a teacher takes an interest in us and is especially kind, or we are looking for an adult outside of our own home, or a subject that interests us, we do remember those teachers in our lives that help us overcome some obstacle. Author and psychiatrist, Dr. Ned Hallowell, often talks about how important it is to make connections in our lives. Also, I believe teachers remember teachers in their lives for the inspiration they offered at some point.
Here’s a thought, work with your dean of faculty, head, or program head and ask your faculty colleagues to take my short survey. To make it easy, set it up in a surveymonkey survey (tabulation is easy), or send out in an email, or just use an old-fashioned paper form you insert in faculty mailboxes at school. Use the results to have a discussion at the next faculty meeting. I suspect that those assembled will reaffirm what they are doing in their own work as teachers.
The teacher we remember most is the greatest tribute we can leave to that teacher. If it is not too late, make a point of letting that teacher know you do remember her/him most.
References
- Hutcheson, Dorothy A. "It’s All About the Teachers." Parents League of New York City Review Parents League of New York City (New York). 2011.
- Conroy, Pat. My Reading Life. Nan A. Talese (New York). 2010.