As a former middle school math teacher and then a high school counselor, thank you for this column. I don't know if people realize just how much words like this from former students mean to those of us who work in the profession. Please say them often, send cards, even years later, to let us know how you're doing. It touches our hearts and brings a little tear to our eyes.
Ok, so here's a teacher story that is probably not what you're expecting...a teacher that had such a negative impact on me in my senior year that I dropped out, and, after a bit of lawlessness, was compelled to join the military rather than face the legal system (they were much less picky about recruits in 1973).
I came into my 12th year at Terry Sanford Senior High in Fayetteville with a pretty damn good track record, grade-wise, and a sense of purpose honed by two years at Oak Ridge Military Institute in years 9 and 10. I had visions of graduating and going to the Air Force Academy or my "safety" school, NCSU. Either way, I intended to pursue a career in aviation after a stint in the Air Force.
Then I ran into Wilma Godwin, who was the AP English teacher for Seniors. Mrs. Godwin did not take the view that Seniors should slide into graduation after busting their humps as Juniors. Rather, she took no small delight in taking cock-sure young over-achievers and breaking them down so completely that even the smartest and strongest were left gasping for air. To this day, more than 50 years later, I recall being made to feel like the dimmest bulb in the chandelier for not grasping the finer points of Chaucer and Middle English. That approach may have worked on some of my classmates. It did NOT work for me.
And so it was that by the start of the second semester and despite the encouragement of many of my friends, I left the friendly confines of Terry Sanford to try my hand at self-sufficiency. Needless to say, that didn't sit well with my parents, and after a particular unpleasant exchange one night, I left and went to stay at a friend's house. I worked at various odd jobs and was generally wretched, which led to the aforementioned petty lawlessness followed by enlisting in the Air Force at age 17 with my parents' consent. Like I said, the services weren't picky, what with Vietnam and all.
I had several very positive and note-worthy educators as I came up the grades, but much like Time's "Person of the Year," the most impactful one is not always the best one.
One of my favorite professors in college was Dr. Linda Jacobs at Francis Marion University in Florence, SC. She was the Shakespeare and Milton professor and I adored her from the first time I met her. I had never met her and on the first day of our Shakespeare class, she walked up to my desk, introduced herself, and shook my hand. She told me that she had read some of the things I had written for other professors and that she had been looking forward to working with me. I have never before, or since, had any other professor do that to me. Sadly, Dr. Jacobs passed away a few years ago from complications of Parkinson’s disease. She never had any children and she loved animals, especially her dogs. There is a scholarship in her memory at Francis Marion and I sent in a donation shortly after she died. I still can’t believe she is gone. I thought of her as the older sister I always wanted, but never had.
Oh man, a teacher absolutely changed my life! My 10th grade English teacher, Mr. William Gehrhardt, was the first person who told me I had talent as a writer and could maybe do it for a living. I wrote this essay about him about 15 years ago, and it’s maybe my favorite thing I’ve ever written. I wrote him a letter thanking him, he wrote me back, and it was wonderful.
I had an English teacher who whacked thesis writing into us. Literally, using a pointer to crack the back of our seat if we weren't paying attention : )
My Approaches to Lit professor, Sam Watson of UNCC, after reading a five-page handwritten assignment in which I had wandered around a topic but never landed anywhere, wrote back to me, "Dear Ellyn, you have a delightful felicity with words. Try not to let that stand in the way of your actually having something to SAY."
Ever since then, I have tried to have something worth saying, or to keep quiet.
Spring of junior year, registering for senior classes. Sitting in library discussing course selection with a certain gal. Me: "I'm going to take easier classes. Sick of homework". She: "I'm taking this pre-calculus class. I heard it's good". Me, hoping desperately to be in the same class as her: "well.... maybe I will take pre-calc too". I was always good at math (perfect score on ACT math section) but did not especially like the subject. Myron Schultz' pre-calc class changed everything, especially the short intro to calculus that finished the year. I remember saying to myself, "Holy crap! This stuff is POWERFUL!". Some 11 years later I was hired as a high school math teacher myself. Had a successful career - district, state, national teaching awards. Every now and then, when something went especially well in my classroom, I would point up, look, and say "this one's for you, Myron". Eventually some kid would ask what the heck I was doing, and I would repeat fpr the class the story I just told.
Mrs. English at Pike County Elementay in Zebulon, Georgia. She was my third teacher. Even at a young age, I was getting labeled as very talkative and off task. She realized I wasn’t being challenged enough. She invested in me. I loved sports do she stated bring on her son’s sports biographies. The Scholastic ones with two athletes, e.g. Joe Montana and Jerry Rice. When I finished an assignment she would let me choose a book that she kept in her closet. It gave it this aura that I was getting to do something special. She knew I was into presidents so she had me write a report on FDR because “The Little White House” was down the road in Warm Springs. I was inspired in my own teaching practices. Don’t buy into labels. Students are begging for an authentic connection. Now, I hope one day my formers students will think of me 30-plus years later the way that I think of Mrs. English. My grandmother passed away a couple years ago and Mrs. English heard I was in town and came to the memorial to see me. It meant the world to me! Thank you for sharing your story.
It's amazing that you asked this question now as I just wrote this for my blog susanscribbles.com (I have not yet uploaded it). Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attached the article I refer to, but it was a simple piece about the loss of my dog.
Nuggets of Encouragement
That little piece, written in January 1998, would ultimately cause me to change paths with reverberations even into retirement.
Not only did I learn how great an outlet writing can be, but the response I received when the article was published was really touching. Friends, family, neighbors, even strangers reached out.
Shortly afterwards, I started thinking about going back to school.
A friend connected me with a professor at the University of Central Florida. After reading some of my writing, he asked, “Why do you want to come back to school?”
“Because I want to be a writer,” I told him.
“But you’re already a writer,” he said.
It’s amazing how those simple words affected me. This wasn’t even particularly a compliment. He didn’t say I was a good writer. And he actually added, “I’d stay away from poetry.”
But I took it and ran. It was as though I was waiting for any nugget of encouragement.
By the end of the year, I was enrolled as a full-time student in English at UCF.
At my “retirement” party from the Kennedy Space Center, the cake read: “You’re Doing the Write Thing!”
Admittedly it was not the most financially sound decision I could have made, but I have never regretted it.
I was a lousy - make that lazy - student in high school. In my elementary and junior high years, I got by on native ability, earning above average grades. When actual work was required, things went a bit south. I graduated in the bottom fifth of my high school class!
On to college, and I was so proud that I actually went into exams having at least read all of the assigned material once. Transferred to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio for my sophomore year. I took a class called advance composition taught by Elizabeth Cummings. After writing an essay of some kind, I’ll never forget receiving it back with a gigantic red F scrawled across the cover page. I went to see Mrs. Cummings, and she bluntly, but gently informed me I had no clue about how to write. First, she had to teach me some basic grammar (conjunctions and semicolons, for example). But she stuck with me and I eventually earned an A for the course.
That set the foundation for a career in law, working as a judge and writing on the side. Years later, when I took a summer writing class with Elizabeth McCracken, she was very encouraging about my writing. Mrs. Cummings deserves so much credit for not coddling a student who needed to learn to work to develop and refine the skills needed to make a way in the world.
My teacher is named Mrs. Leo. She taught English at our Catholic school for grades five, seven, and eight. About a quarter of a class of 40 students became writers and/or creatives and I think it was her teaching that influenced us. We still correct each others' grammar, diagram sentences, and use words of the day that she taught us. Recently, a classmate found Mrs. Leo; I have her phone number but am nervous to call. This article is just the motivation I needed!
My mother taught me to read when I was five years old and sent me off to school a year later figuring I was ahead of the game. But before the year was over the school had sent me home to stay because I was “too immature to learn how to read.” Yep, that’s right. I got kicked out of first grade.
At the first of what would be many meetings between my parents and Lubbock (Texas) ISD teachers and administrators, my parents countered the illiteracy part of the school’s assessment by pointing out that I already knew how to read, thus I obviously wasn’t too immature to learn something I already knew how to do. But the gist of the matter turned out to be not my inability to read but an unwillingness to read the words the teacher asked me to read. Mom taught me to read with a book called Hey Wingo that used phonics as its main teaching tool. My first grade teacher used the “look-see” method. The teacher would show us a picture of, say, a horse with the word “HORSE” printed underneath the picture in big bold letters.
“What’s this a picture of?” teacher would ask.
The good students replied, “That’s a horse. H-o-r-s-e. Horse.”
I would reply, “That’s a cow. C-o-w. Cow.”
That’s what the teachers meant by being too immature to learn to read. They suggested I try again, maybe the following year. I think mom was still teaching me at home when a couple of men in suits from the school district showed up at the house to ask mom why I wasn’t in school. “Well,” she drawled in her heavy Appalchian accent. “We sent him to school, and they sent him right back.”
The next thing I knew I was attending first grade at a Catholic school, the only private school in town illing to accept a reject from the public school system. By all accounts, I did well there. My parents didn’t want me indoctrinated in any religion, so I enrolled in second grade at another tuition-free public school across town from the first. Same story, second grade. The school sent me to the third grade on the theory that I was bored and needed a challenge, but that didn't go well either. The teacher even gave me an “F” in Citizenship and assured my parents that no one else in the history of Lubbock education had ever failed Citizenship. Back to second grade I went, much to my second grade teacher's disapointment.
Mrs. Laird, my fourth grade teacher at Parkway Elementary, was sweet, sincere and pretty. I wanted her to like me, but inevitably, the day came when Mrs. Laird took all she could take and ordered me to stay after school for disrupting class yet again. After the other students were gone she pulled a chair up next to my desk and smiled with what I remember as a disconcerting combination of sweetness and pity. “The reason I asked you to stay after school is because I have a problem, and I want you to help me figure out what to do about it. Will you help me?”
The only answer here was “Yes.”
Then she looked me in the eye and said, “You’re the funniest kid I’ve ever had in my class. You make people laugh. You even make me laugh! You have a wonderful gift – a sense of humor. Believe me, I don’t want to be the one who takes that gift away from you.”
Of course, I knew the hammer was about the fall and I was the nail
“The problem is, I can’t teach class when you’re cutting up and all the other students are paying attention to you,” she said. “How about we make a deal? What if I give you a chance to crack jokes in class, but only at certain times? When I’m talking to the class, I want the other students listening to me – not you.”
How, I wondered, would I recognize when that certain time came around?
“If you start to say something while I’m teaching, I’ll give you a look.” She pushed her eye glasses to the bottom of her nose and peered over the top of them, making her look a little like a fussy librarian. “Like that. Got it? If I give you this look, you have to be quiet. If I call on you I’ll give you the same look if I want a serious answer. You can be you. You just have to let me be me. Deal?”
Sure, Mrs. Laird got tired of people asking her why she wore her glasses down on the bottom of her nose all the time, but I finally got a handle on my place in the classroom, relative to the teacher’s and everybody else’s. As proof, I point to the fact that my Citizenship grade improved to a “B.”
The last time I heard from Mrs. Laird I was a senior in high school and my name was in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal because Ingenue magazine had just published a story I wrote about my continuing struggles with my Lubbock schooling called “The Case of the Missing Vice Principal.” Mrs. Laird called to congratulate me. “I’m so proud of you, but I’m not surprised,” she told me. “I’ll bet it’s a funny story, too!”
“It’s hilarious,” I assured her.
We talked a few minutes, and I’m sure I thanked her for being a great teacher but I don’t think I ever got around to saying thanks for her most valuable lesson, and the gentle way she got it across.
In fact, I gave scant thought to fourth grade over the next half century until a few years ago when a friend posted on Facebook about the trials and tribulations she had had with her daughter, who just wouldn’t behave in school. The woman asked her Facebook friends for help, and their suggestions ran from whipping the girl to “within an inch of her life” to grounding to various forms of humiliation and embarrassment.
None of that worked, I knew, because mostly well-meaning adults had tried all of those methods on me at one time or another. What worked was simply a few kind words and a certain look from a teacher who accepted a goofy, immature kid for who and what he was, and took it from there.
Mrs. Laird, if you read this: Thank you. And I’m not kidding.
As a former middle school math teacher and then a high school counselor, thank you for this column. I don't know if people realize just how much words like this from former students mean to those of us who work in the profession. Please say them often, send cards, even years later, to let us know how you're doing. It touches our hearts and brings a little tear to our eyes.
Ok, so here's a teacher story that is probably not what you're expecting...a teacher that had such a negative impact on me in my senior year that I dropped out, and, after a bit of lawlessness, was compelled to join the military rather than face the legal system (they were much less picky about recruits in 1973).
I came into my 12th year at Terry Sanford Senior High in Fayetteville with a pretty damn good track record, grade-wise, and a sense of purpose honed by two years at Oak Ridge Military Institute in years 9 and 10. I had visions of graduating and going to the Air Force Academy or my "safety" school, NCSU. Either way, I intended to pursue a career in aviation after a stint in the Air Force.
Then I ran into Wilma Godwin, who was the AP English teacher for Seniors. Mrs. Godwin did not take the view that Seniors should slide into graduation after busting their humps as Juniors. Rather, she took no small delight in taking cock-sure young over-achievers and breaking them down so completely that even the smartest and strongest were left gasping for air. To this day, more than 50 years later, I recall being made to feel like the dimmest bulb in the chandelier for not grasping the finer points of Chaucer and Middle English. That approach may have worked on some of my classmates. It did NOT work for me.
And so it was that by the start of the second semester and despite the encouragement of many of my friends, I left the friendly confines of Terry Sanford to try my hand at self-sufficiency. Needless to say, that didn't sit well with my parents, and after a particular unpleasant exchange one night, I left and went to stay at a friend's house. I worked at various odd jobs and was generally wretched, which led to the aforementioned petty lawlessness followed by enlisting in the Air Force at age 17 with my parents' consent. Like I said, the services weren't picky, what with Vietnam and all.
I had several very positive and note-worthy educators as I came up the grades, but much like Time's "Person of the Year," the most impactful one is not always the best one.
Well, the question was "Did a teacher change your life?" And the answer is obviously yes...
One of my favorite professors in college was Dr. Linda Jacobs at Francis Marion University in Florence, SC. She was the Shakespeare and Milton professor and I adored her from the first time I met her. I had never met her and on the first day of our Shakespeare class, she walked up to my desk, introduced herself, and shook my hand. She told me that she had read some of the things I had written for other professors and that she had been looking forward to working with me. I have never before, or since, had any other professor do that to me. Sadly, Dr. Jacobs passed away a few years ago from complications of Parkinson’s disease. She never had any children and she loved animals, especially her dogs. There is a scholarship in her memory at Francis Marion and I sent in a donation shortly after she died. I still can’t believe she is gone. I thought of her as the older sister I always wanted, but never had.
Oh man, a teacher absolutely changed my life! My 10th grade English teacher, Mr. William Gehrhardt, was the first person who told me I had talent as a writer and could maybe do it for a living. I wrote this essay about him about 15 years ago, and it’s maybe my favorite thing I’ve ever written. I wrote him a letter thanking him, he wrote me back, and it was wonderful.
https://michaeljlewis.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/the-man-who-inspired-me-to-be-a-writer/
I had an English teacher who whacked thesis writing into us. Literally, using a pointer to crack the back of our seat if we weren't paying attention : )
Mrs. Godwin would have been proud of that one!
Apologies to those who have heard this story.
My Approaches to Lit professor, Sam Watson of UNCC, after reading a five-page handwritten assignment in which I had wandered around a topic but never landed anywhere, wrote back to me, "Dear Ellyn, you have a delightful felicity with words. Try not to let that stand in the way of your actually having something to SAY."
Ever since then, I have tried to have something worth saying, or to keep quiet.
Spring of junior year, registering for senior classes. Sitting in library discussing course selection with a certain gal. Me: "I'm going to take easier classes. Sick of homework". She: "I'm taking this pre-calculus class. I heard it's good". Me, hoping desperately to be in the same class as her: "well.... maybe I will take pre-calc too". I was always good at math (perfect score on ACT math section) but did not especially like the subject. Myron Schultz' pre-calc class changed everything, especially the short intro to calculus that finished the year. I remember saying to myself, "Holy crap! This stuff is POWERFUL!". Some 11 years later I was hired as a high school math teacher myself. Had a successful career - district, state, national teaching awards. Every now and then, when something went especially well in my classroom, I would point up, look, and say "this one's for you, Myron". Eventually some kid would ask what the heck I was doing, and I would repeat fpr the class the story I just told.
Surely the young lady gets some of the credit ...
She did -- at a class reunion.
Mrs. English at Pike County Elementay in Zebulon, Georgia. She was my third teacher. Even at a young age, I was getting labeled as very talkative and off task. She realized I wasn’t being challenged enough. She invested in me. I loved sports do she stated bring on her son’s sports biographies. The Scholastic ones with two athletes, e.g. Joe Montana and Jerry Rice. When I finished an assignment she would let me choose a book that she kept in her closet. It gave it this aura that I was getting to do something special. She knew I was into presidents so she had me write a report on FDR because “The Little White House” was down the road in Warm Springs. I was inspired in my own teaching practices. Don’t buy into labels. Students are begging for an authentic connection. Now, I hope one day my formers students will think of me 30-plus years later the way that I think of Mrs. English. My grandmother passed away a couple years ago and Mrs. English heard I was in town and came to the memorial to see me. It meant the world to me! Thank you for sharing your story.
It's amazing that you asked this question now as I just wrote this for my blog susanscribbles.com (I have not yet uploaded it). Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attached the article I refer to, but it was a simple piece about the loss of my dog.
Nuggets of Encouragement
That little piece, written in January 1998, would ultimately cause me to change paths with reverberations even into retirement.
Not only did I learn how great an outlet writing can be, but the response I received when the article was published was really touching. Friends, family, neighbors, even strangers reached out.
Shortly afterwards, I started thinking about going back to school.
A friend connected me with a professor at the University of Central Florida. After reading some of my writing, he asked, “Why do you want to come back to school?”
“Because I want to be a writer,” I told him.
“But you’re already a writer,” he said.
It’s amazing how those simple words affected me. This wasn’t even particularly a compliment. He didn’t say I was a good writer. And he actually added, “I’d stay away from poetry.”
But I took it and ran. It was as though I was waiting for any nugget of encouragement.
By the end of the year, I was enrolled as a full-time student in English at UCF.
At my “retirement” party from the Kennedy Space Center, the cake read: “You’re Doing the Write Thing!”
Admittedly it was not the most financially sound decision I could have made, but I have never regretted it.
Be generous with those nuggets of encouragement.
I was a lousy - make that lazy - student in high school. In my elementary and junior high years, I got by on native ability, earning above average grades. When actual work was required, things went a bit south. I graduated in the bottom fifth of my high school class!
On to college, and I was so proud that I actually went into exams having at least read all of the assigned material once. Transferred to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio for my sophomore year. I took a class called advance composition taught by Elizabeth Cummings. After writing an essay of some kind, I’ll never forget receiving it back with a gigantic red F scrawled across the cover page. I went to see Mrs. Cummings, and she bluntly, but gently informed me I had no clue about how to write. First, she had to teach me some basic grammar (conjunctions and semicolons, for example). But she stuck with me and I eventually earned an A for the course.
That set the foundation for a career in law, working as a judge and writing on the side. Years later, when I took a summer writing class with Elizabeth McCracken, she was very encouraging about my writing. Mrs. Cummings deserves so much credit for not coddling a student who needed to learn to work to develop and refine the skills needed to make a way in the world.
My teacher is named Mrs. Leo. She taught English at our Catholic school for grades five, seven, and eight. About a quarter of a class of 40 students became writers and/or creatives and I think it was her teaching that influenced us. We still correct each others' grammar, diagram sentences, and use words of the day that she taught us. Recently, a classmate found Mrs. Leo; I have her phone number but am nervous to call. This article is just the motivation I needed!
My mother taught me to read when I was five years old and sent me off to school a year later figuring I was ahead of the game. But before the year was over the school had sent me home to stay because I was “too immature to learn how to read.” Yep, that’s right. I got kicked out of first grade.
At the first of what would be many meetings between my parents and Lubbock (Texas) ISD teachers and administrators, my parents countered the illiteracy part of the school’s assessment by pointing out that I already knew how to read, thus I obviously wasn’t too immature to learn something I already knew how to do. But the gist of the matter turned out to be not my inability to read but an unwillingness to read the words the teacher asked me to read. Mom taught me to read with a book called Hey Wingo that used phonics as its main teaching tool. My first grade teacher used the “look-see” method. The teacher would show us a picture of, say, a horse with the word “HORSE” printed underneath the picture in big bold letters.
“What’s this a picture of?” teacher would ask.
The good students replied, “That’s a horse. H-o-r-s-e. Horse.”
I would reply, “That’s a cow. C-o-w. Cow.”
That’s what the teachers meant by being too immature to learn to read. They suggested I try again, maybe the following year. I think mom was still teaching me at home when a couple of men in suits from the school district showed up at the house to ask mom why I wasn’t in school. “Well,” she drawled in her heavy Appalchian accent. “We sent him to school, and they sent him right back.”
The next thing I knew I was attending first grade at a Catholic school, the only private school in town illing to accept a reject from the public school system. By all accounts, I did well there. My parents didn’t want me indoctrinated in any religion, so I enrolled in second grade at another tuition-free public school across town from the first. Same story, second grade. The school sent me to the third grade on the theory that I was bored and needed a challenge, but that didn't go well either. The teacher even gave me an “F” in Citizenship and assured my parents that no one else in the history of Lubbock education had ever failed Citizenship. Back to second grade I went, much to my second grade teacher's disapointment.
Mrs. Laird, my fourth grade teacher at Parkway Elementary, was sweet, sincere and pretty. I wanted her to like me, but inevitably, the day came when Mrs. Laird took all she could take and ordered me to stay after school for disrupting class yet again. After the other students were gone she pulled a chair up next to my desk and smiled with what I remember as a disconcerting combination of sweetness and pity. “The reason I asked you to stay after school is because I have a problem, and I want you to help me figure out what to do about it. Will you help me?”
The only answer here was “Yes.”
Then she looked me in the eye and said, “You’re the funniest kid I’ve ever had in my class. You make people laugh. You even make me laugh! You have a wonderful gift – a sense of humor. Believe me, I don’t want to be the one who takes that gift away from you.”
Of course, I knew the hammer was about the fall and I was the nail
“The problem is, I can’t teach class when you’re cutting up and all the other students are paying attention to you,” she said. “How about we make a deal? What if I give you a chance to crack jokes in class, but only at certain times? When I’m talking to the class, I want the other students listening to me – not you.”
How, I wondered, would I recognize when that certain time came around?
“If you start to say something while I’m teaching, I’ll give you a look.” She pushed her eye glasses to the bottom of her nose and peered over the top of them, making her look a little like a fussy librarian. “Like that. Got it? If I give you this look, you have to be quiet. If I call on you I’ll give you the same look if I want a serious answer. You can be you. You just have to let me be me. Deal?”
Sure, Mrs. Laird got tired of people asking her why she wore her glasses down on the bottom of her nose all the time, but I finally got a handle on my place in the classroom, relative to the teacher’s and everybody else’s. As proof, I point to the fact that my Citizenship grade improved to a “B.”
The last time I heard from Mrs. Laird I was a senior in high school and my name was in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal because Ingenue magazine had just published a story I wrote about my continuing struggles with my Lubbock schooling called “The Case of the Missing Vice Principal.” Mrs. Laird called to congratulate me. “I’m so proud of you, but I’m not surprised,” she told me. “I’ll bet it’s a funny story, too!”
“It’s hilarious,” I assured her.
We talked a few minutes, and I’m sure I thanked her for being a great teacher but I don’t think I ever got around to saying thanks for her most valuable lesson, and the gentle way she got it across.
In fact, I gave scant thought to fourth grade over the next half century until a few years ago when a friend posted on Facebook about the trials and tribulations she had had with her daughter, who just wouldn’t behave in school. The woman asked her Facebook friends for help, and their suggestions ran from whipping the girl to “within an inch of her life” to grounding to various forms of humiliation and embarrassment.
None of that worked, I knew, because mostly well-meaning adults had tried all of those methods on me at one time or another. What worked was simply a few kind words and a certain look from a teacher who accepted a goofy, immature kid for who and what he was, and took it from there.
Mrs. Laird, if you read this: Thank you. And I’m not kidding.