Teacher Appreciation Week
"Education is not the filling of a pot but the lighting of a fire" —Yeats
Like seemingly the entire population of Europe, I am on fall break this week. The third week in October was always a holiday during my childhood too, because of the Minnesota Educators’ Association convention. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to pay tribute to the teachers who have touched our lives. First, I’ll tell you about one of my favorite teachers, Ms. S, and then I hope you’ll share your own stories about teachers who have inspired you.
I have been lucky to have had some outstanding teachers, but Ms. S, my eleventh-grade chemistry teacher, was truly special and helped make me who I am today.
Before taking her class, this is what I thought chemistry was about:
In Ms. S’s class, I learned that chemistry was not only about pouring brightly-colored solutions from test tubes into Erlenmeyer flasks.1 Ms. S taught us to balance equations and cancel labels, and we learned that in chemistry—as in all the sciences—we use math and logic to help us understand phenomena we observe in the world. I didn’t become a scientist, but decades after taking her class I still try to approach problems through logic and systematic thinking, and I still love, metaphorically, to find balance and cancel labels. But, as with all great teachers, Ms. S taught me much more than the official content of the syllabus.
She was a role model. It may be difficult to imagine this today, when—on one end of childhood—seemingly every parenting article exhorts readers to “boost your baby’s brain power,” and when—on the other end—high school students and their parents are enmeshed in a pitched battle for admission to elite universities, but I grew up in a time and place where it was considered vaguely shameful for anyone, but especially girls, to enjoy and be good at academic things. My parents raised me to like myself just as I am, but at school it was another matter entirely. Other kids called me “brain,” and they were not paying me a compliment. Ms. S helped me to learn to value that part of myself that loves intellectual pursuits, and to have confidence that my way of existing in the world was worthwhile too.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Ms. S encouraged us students to care about learning, because she had a PhD in chemistry and before coming to our school had been a professor at a top research university. I once asked her why she left such a prestigious career to come teach in our humble suburb, and she told me that there were more important things in life than the admiration of other people: “I wanted to be able to actually see my children once in awhile.” While she encouraged me to consider a career in science, she was honest about the demands it makes on women, and especially on mothers. And while she may have sacrificed some status to become a teacher, she also likely contributed as much if not more good to the world by teaching science to public school kids.
She could take a joke. Ms. S was a tolerant soul, but there was one thing she could not abide: the smell of watermelon gum. She would deliver epic rants about its nauseous odor. One year for April Fool’s Day, some kids in our class played a prank. They put watermelon gum inside of Ms. S’s overhead projector, Elmo.2 She began her lecture that day, and as Elmo heated up and his fan came on, the odious artificial watermelon fumes wafted throughout the classroom. Ms. S just laughed and said, “Awww! You got me!” (And then opened the windows.)
She gave me an awesome necklace. Ms. S owned a taxidermied piranha that was slightly bigger than the palm of my hand. It hung from a chain of Indian corn and presided over her bulletin board as decoration. When I admired it, she gave it to me! I wore that piranha necklace to parties3 until it crumbled to pieces. Thanks to the necklace, I met many interesting people—most of whom belonged to a self-selected group of people interested in piranha necklaces, but still.
She gave me opportunities. At the end of my junior year, the school district decided that they would pilot an honors biology class for tenth graders during the next school year, and they selected Ms. S to teach it. She asked if I would like to be her TA, and I enthusiastically agreed. We arranged for me to take a study hall for the class period when honors biology met, so I was able to come every day. I observed her teaching, helped out with labs, talked with her about how to grade the assignments, and even taught some of the lessons and got her useful feedback afterwards. This early teaching experience was part of the reason I became a teacher myself.
She helped me say goodbye. Ms. S grew up in Panama. She once told me that when she was a child, the DDT truck would come through their neighborhood every night while she and her family were eating dinner. The windows were usually wide open, so they would hold their breaths as the DDT cloud passed through the dining room, and then they would resume eating. The younger kids used to follow the truck and play in the spray, which was cool and refreshing on hot days.
When I was in my early twenties, I learned that Ms. S had terminal cancer. She was only in her forties. I called her to thank her for all she had done for me, but as soon as I heard her voice on the phone I started to cry. Ms. S made it easy for me. “I guess you’ve heard that I’m not doing so well, huh?” she asked. I managed to blurt out my thanks and said how sorry I was. She was curious to hear how I was doing and what I had been up to since graduation. We had a good talk, she thanked me for checking in, and we said goodbye. I still think about her all the time.
Readers, now it’s your turn. Who were the teachers who touched your life? Please share your thoughts and stories in the comments!
The Tidbit
This week’s tidbit comes courtesy of my twelfth-grade math teacher, Mr. L. He was not only a terrific math teacher but also quite the character. To reinforce the importance of doing well in school, he would wear a suit and tie to school on every test day (as a joke, for the last test of our senior year, we all wore suits and dresses to class too). And to entertain us as we were wandering in and setting up, he would start every class with a joke. Contrary to what you might be expecting, his jokes were usually really good. Here’s a favorite:4
Pat and Mike are in the IRA, and they’ve encountered a problem. There’s a new guy at Scotland Yard, Nigel, and every time Pat and Mike plan an action, Nigel somehow finds out ahead of time and foils it.
After they have to call off their tenth action in a row, Pat and Mike are fed up, and they decide to take care of Nigel once and for all. So they lay a trap for him: They put out word that they’re planning another action, and then they booby-trap the only road there. They station a herd of moose in the road to block Nigel’s car. They pour bacon grease all over the road so Nigel will skid and crash. In case he misses those traps, they string a wire across the road further down, which will trip a bomb. And in case he misses that trap too, they also dig a pit in the road and fill it with spikes and snakes.
On the appointed day, Pat and Mike hide near the road to observe the carnage. The hour approaches, and there is no sign of Nigel. They wait and wait, but he still doesn’t arrive. Finally, several hours later, Pat looks worriedly at Mike and says, “Gee, I hope nothing happened to him.”
Although I did learn in her class that when you add phenylalanine to a basic solution, it turns a glowing fuchsia.
Ms. S called her overhead projector Elmo because of the label on his side.
If you are getting the impression that I was something of an odd duck in high school, you would not be wrong.
With the help of my daughter, who is a master of the shaggy-dog story, I have tarted up the original version a bit.
Mr. D, my h.s. Latin Teacher.
I've had many wonderful teachers but the first to really alter my lifelong self-image was Mrs. A, my senior year honors English teacher. She challenged us to read really advanced literature--Ellison! Dostoevsky! Bronte! Faulkner!--but I also did a creative writing assignment for her, a historical fiction piece about my grandmother as a teenager during the Belfast Blitz. She gave me 100 on the assignment and added a note to come talk to her about it. So I did, and we talked, and she was so encouraging of my writing. Years later, she called my parents to ask if I'd become a teacher (I had considered it, but didn't; I was working for a newspaper). She wanted to offer me a job.
I love the tidbit joke. A woman substitute teacher I once had for high school French, leading up to Thanksgiving, told a joke that I still tell:
Do you know how to catch a turkey? First you have to dig a deep hole, deep enough that he can't flap out. This is important: you have to dump a bucket of fireplace ashes down in the hole. Then you get a bag of green peas and line them up around the entire perimeter of the hole; turkeys love peas, you see. Then, when the turkey comes to take a pea you kick him in the ash hole.