Just as spring began reintroducing its aromatic charms, I received an email from a former student. Alex took an introductory writing course with me five years ago. He was a diligent but unremarkable student. I don’t remember a conversation outside of the classroom, and he was not a member of the two groups of students I tend to remember most—the ones who shine and excel, and the ones who limp through the course either unable or unwilling to successfully maneuver with the material. But when I saw Alex’s name, I remembered his face and his gentle manner.
In his email Alex said he was soon to be married. He relayed that the upcoming milestone had prompted him toward reflection. He detailed the highlights of his life since graduation and wrote that he was satisfied with his life and surprised by unexpected trajectories. Then he spent a few paragraphs specifying what he had learned from me about “being the kind of person in the world that I wanted to be” and thanked me.
My heart swelled. The most potent gifts in my life are communiques like Alex’s–field reports from former students who reach back through the years, contact me and tell me about their harvest. Teachers are farmers. We spend our time dropping the seeds of ideas and information into the fertile minds of young people, but they move on and into their lives before we see what fully blooms. We operate on faith.
We all know the power of a good teacher, the potency of inspiration, the life-lasting imprint they have on who we are. Alex’s email moved me, warmed me and spurred me to remember some of the teachers who have influenced me. Most have passed, but they live on inside me, and I use this essay to thank and remember them.
My first-grade teacher, Mrs. McGibney, smelled like lilacs and baby powder. She favored sleeveless floral dresses cinched at the waist with tiny belts. As she scratched chalk across the blackboard at St. Francis of Assisi school, introducing me to the mysterious wonders of the alphabet, her upper arms rippled like fleshy water. She was one of the few lay teachers in our small Catholic school, and I remember her as kindly and loving, an antidote to the stern and scary nuns who ran the place. The nuns scolded us for our misdemeanors and talked a lot about scary stuff like hell and purgatory. As we left Mrs. McGibney’s classroom each afternoon, she hugged us and called us her sugarplums. I felt safe with her. And loved.
My eighth grade English teacher at Southwest Junior High was Mrs. Permenter, officially sanctioned by students as a cool teacher. Mrs. Permenter’s window ledges were colonized by dozens of geraniums. She arranged her classroom desks into a big circle (a clearly radical move back them) and played Simon & Garfunkel while we wrote essays. In her class, I was introduced to the transportational abilities of literature and beguiled by language. What I remember most about Mrs. Permenter is that she didn’t talk down to us, didn’t treat us like little kids. She cared, and we opened in her presence like her geraniums did, igniting into flame red blossoms under her attention.
I remember Mr. Cummings from Lakeland High School, whose zeal for biology was a contagion. It was tenth grade, and I approached biology with the same enthusiasm most of us have for root canals. But day after day Mr. Cummings, a trim and dapper man, spoke almost reverently about biology. His interest made me pay attention. Every week in class he put us into groups while we dissected frogs, identified rocks, looked through microscopes at leaves and rain. Mr. Cummings introduced me to hidden worlds, the traffic and industry of our inner and outer worlds that are invisible to the eye.
May 17 was graduation day at the small international liberal arts university where I teach. Speeches bloated with cliches, a band bleating the national anthem, diplomas and the cap toss. It is a beloved and well attended annual ritual at our university.
After the ceremony a group of five teachers gathered for a late lunch. We were exhausted, depleted and a bit lost. Our talk turned to our students. We speculated about where they might work, what projects they would undergo, what they would study in grad school. And I thought of Alex. I wondered then if there would be more field reports in my future, more sweet surprise updates for this farmer who once again planted, watered the soil, and holds the faith that this act called teaching will yield somewhere in a future we all have yet to see.
