Teaching - Is there a more valuable and rewarding (and less valued and rewarded) profession?

We can all list the teachers who were most influential in our lives.

My classmates and I were all terrified of Miss Copeland, the prototypical spinster who had also taught mathematics to my mother before me. She ruled with an iron fist and paced the room with a steely glare, making us work out sixth grade math problems on the board in front of everyone. One day, she leaned down and whispered in my ear, “I see you’re struggling with this. Ask your mother if you can stay after school tomorrow and I’ll help you.” No one would have believed me if I’d told them. During that hour, she was patient and kind, eventually getting me past my fear of long division. But that wasn’t the real lesson. The real lesson was that people aren’t always what they seem and assumptions shouldn’t be made based upon public personas.

Mr. New was my senior English teacher. He also had a firm demeanor, but his caring and enthusiastic way of bringing literature alive and helping us to understand why grammar and punctuation were so important as we struggled to write our first research papers did more than just get through to me. These attributes instilled in me a desire to do the same for others. When we graduated, he actually gave very personalized, handwritten notes of congratulations to each of his students. I was extremely quiet and shy in school and was shocked that he mentioned in my note some of the little accomplishments that I was sure no one had noticed – such as a particularly period-authentic bonnet I’d fashioned when working on costumes for the school’s production of “Scrooge” and how well I’d done when I’d stepped in to substitute for someone in the radio news competition at a speech meet.

There were others of course. Mr. Raymond saw past the awkward girl and encouraged stage presence in show choir. Ms. Anderson gave me my first backstage experience as student director of “The Music Man” and helped to instill my love of the theater and appreciation of all of the hard work that goes on backstage to make a production successful. Miss Squires encouraged my artistic nature and, when it came down to it, was probably the reason I chose to attend her alma mater.

Then, I was a teacher too.

I taught high school English, Speech and Drama for eleven years and I loved every minute of it. I could go on and on about how much *I* was the one who gained:

• When someone who “hated literature” finally “got” Romeo and Juliet or Julius Caesar;
• The first time a terribly shy student stood up in front of the class and gave a speech that was entertaining and well-presented;
• When a drama production that I directed went completely awry on opening night and my amazing students managed to get everything back on track all on their own; and
• By being a class sponsor - helping to build all of those floats, planning and chaperoning all of those dances, beautiful proms and the tearful graduations. 

Those eleven years were one of the most amazing periods of my life. I loved every one of “my kids” -- even the ones I didn’t like very much. Although I eventually burned out and moved on from my teaching career, I still miss it.

I’ve been lucky enough to maintain contact with some of my ex-students over the 16 years since I last taught and now, through Facebook, well over 100 more of them have found me. I used to joke about being a teacher as "having done my good deed for my life,” but I don’t say that jokingly anymore. That’s because I now can see the ones who became doctors or nurses, the ones pursuing art or music or acting professionally, the hard-working ones with families of their own and children who look just like them, and, perhaps most gratifying of all, the ones who became teachers themselves. If I had any tiny part in helping those things to happen, teaching was, after all, the good deed of my life.

So, I guess this blog post is a way to say something that I should have said long ago to Miss Copeland and Mr. New (who are no longer with us), Ms. Anderson, Miss Squires, Mr. Raymond, and all of the other wonderful teachers who taught me so many lessons and helped to make me who I am. Thank you.

Oh – and Mr. New – I wish you could know that I also gave notes of congratulations to each of my senior students upon their graduation and I always included at least one specific personalized message about something they'd accomplished. That was as much a tribute to you as it was for them.

Now the whole thing has come full circle. This is as it should be and I hope that circle may long continue.