A teacher’s influence has lasting power

W hen I was in first grade, the nuns still wore heavy black habits with flowing skirts and long head coverings accented by a starched white piece across the forehead.

So it was mystifying when one of them talked about going swimming. How could she accomplish it without getting waterlogged, I puzzled, imagining her immersed in a pool fully clothed.

It’s funny, sometimes, how teachers impress you.

For instance, I can’t put a finger on anything specific that Mrs. King taught me in fourth grade, but I recall the terror of the previous year when she caught me and another third-grader tossing erasers at each other in the courtyard instead of cleaning them.

I remember Mr. Arteaga, my eighth-grade math teacher, offering early morning lessons in algebra so I’d be ahead of the game as a freshman.

I carry pieces of favorite high school teachers and college professors, even the one who wrote “This paper is a mess!” on one of my English assignments.

Late each spring, thousands of students will say goodbye to another academic year, and their teachers, I suspect, will grin with relief – once they turn in final grades, that is.

Having spent hours in elementary and middle school classrooms during the past nine years, I continue to marvel at how teachers cope with sensory overload for a full day and come back to do it again tomorrow. But they do it all over, often unrewarded but for the personal knowledge that they’ve made a difference in some child’s life.

I like to think that my family’s overwhelmingly favorable experience thus far in two elementaries and two middle schools is typical. I’m also realistic enough to know that it isn’t typical enough – not yet.

I suspect that we weren’t the only ones to encounter teachers who utterly failed to control their classrooms, who belittled students or who were incompetent in the subject they were supposed to be teaching.

But I trust that those are more anomaly than norm. And I don’t believe those will be the educators whom my children will remember when they’re sending their own kids to school.

I hope, instead, that it will be the iconoclastic first-grade teacher who stuck to proven techniques, regardless of quixotic district mandates, who juggled kids at several different levels of learning and managed to pull those at the bottom up and push those at the top even further.

It should be the elementary teachers who inspired them to think creatively, to work harder than they really wanted, to get excited about science and history.

It could be the teacher who warned our kids how demanding she’d be in the fall – only to be transferred just before the semester started.

I trust it will be the ebullient sixth-grade teacher who helped my children realize that writing wasn’t something that they really feared or hated.

And it’ll be the energetic English teacher who had them recounting minute details from Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and turning “Romeo and Juliet” into a board game and a video performed in the front yard.

I’m sure it will be the coach who persuaded me, against my firm resolve and better judgment, to let my son play middle school football, and who then drove him to reach beyond self-imposed limits.

And it will be the eighth-grade coach who saw my daughter’s potential in sports that she’d barely played before and nurtured the development of her skills and confidence.

I believe it will be the teachers and coaches who let kids be themselves and take the time to learn who that is. Who know that note-taking and regurgitation might impart information but that it takes far more effort to convey knowledge and inspire love of learning. Who give their students a chance to joke around and laugh along with them.

The particular teachers I’ve described know who they are – at least I hope they recognize themselves and realize how much influence they wield. There are many others like them out there, caring and committed, who set high standards and give their students encouragement and support, whether or not they carry them from home.

There’s a scene near the end of Harper Lee’s masterpiece, when calm has returned after Boo Radley has saved Jem and Scout from a drunken, murder-minded Bob Ewell. “Thank you for my children,” Atticus Finch tells Boo.

This seems like a good time to say, “Thank you for my children” to the teachers who’ve spent long and dedicated days trying to make a difference in their lives.