I had Ms. Lee for English I through IV. She didn’t believe in accepting less than your best and never gave out 100s on writing assignments.
I was friends with her youngest son and he told me that one night she spend four-and-a-half hours grading a one page paper I had summited to find a mistake so I could get my usual 99.
Mrs. Peer was my fifth grade teacher in a very small public school in northern New Hampshire. Everyone knew everyone else, and my grade was infamously well known.
Mrs. Peer treated us with respect. She challenged us. She pushed us to be better students. Most importantly, she read aloud to us.
One of the books she read aloud, Goodnight Mr. Tom by Michelle Magorian, is the first chapter book I remember re-reading over and over again. I had struggled with reading as a young child, and Mrs. Peer helped me learn to love stories. I read more, and my reading improved.
The person who inspired me to become a teacher was my ninth grade English honors teacher, Mr. David Nunnery. He made class exciting and meaningful, and that’s not an easy thing to do with English.
I can remember being excited to go to class and disappointed when he was out sick. He would always hold me to high expectations, check me when I didn’t rise to them, and reset them when I seemed to be reaching them too easily. He would always say, “Are you sure you want to be a teacher?” and then joke about how I’ll be broke all the time like he is. Great teachers are one in a million and I am truly blessed to have had one.
Mrs. McKee (who was Miss Hunter at the time) was such a phenomenal English teacher. She fostered my love of reading and was always encouraging me to try new genres and broaden my horizons. She especially helped me to grow as a writer. I developed a love of vocabulary as her student, which she helped me to embed within my prose. Subsequently to moving to a new town and then graduating from high school, college, and graduate school, I’ve been able to keep in touch with Mrs. McKee. Her calm, nurturing, and encouraging ways are hopefully reflected when I work with my current students today!
One month ago, I became a teacher, in the legitimate sense of the word, when I walked into a conference room in Santiago, Chile, and saw a group of business professionals waiting to learn English. We said hello and that marked the extent of the language we shared until I started teaching. Progress was about to become audible and visible and believable.
I learned what it meant to teach, in the purest sense of the word, 18 years ago in Mrs. Mell’s eighth grade advanced English classroom at Corte Madera School in Portola Valley, a small suburb of San Francisco or San Jose, depending on how you look at the map. Progress may have been less literal during any given hour of instruction, but by the end of the year, I was still able to speak an entirely new language.
At the time, I already loved to read. I already had an idea that I could find something in books by L.M. Montgomery, Judy Blume, Christopher Pike, and V.C. Andrews that I couldn’t find in real life. What I didn’t yet know was that there was a way to critically think about and discuss books and real life in such a way that we as readers could articulate the connections we sensed were there all along. Mrs. Mell would change that.
Ms. Ochoa opened up a world for me that I never knew existed within me. She opened up the beautiful world of writing. She was my 6th grade teacher and she gave us weekly creative writing assignments. She would read aloud my stories every chance she got. She taught me that it was cool to be a writer and encouraged my every endeavor. She made me feel so good about it. I fell in love with writing that year, and have loved it since. I am now an English teacher and I have her to thank for it.
Mr. Beschta did not suffer fools. He would not tolerate even a tiny murmur of chit-chat in class, and if anyone crossed him, he would stop class in its tracks and wait quietly for the offending student to apologize. I only once ever saw him explicitly ask for an apology from a particularly dim girl who hadn’t gotten the memo on his softly authoritative style of discipline.
He was also, in my opinion, one of the most gifted and passionate teachers at the school, and he exposed hundreds (probably thousands) of students to contemporary poetry — Robert Bly, Carolyn Forche, Li Young Lee, Galway Kinnell. He froze us to our seats reading Kinnell’s poem ”The Bear” aloud.
Growing up in Edina, Minnesota, in the ’70s and ’80s, I had a lot of great teachers, including Claudia Lawrence (back then she was Mrs. Bisanz), Marc Reigel, Delores Heyer, Ursella Costello, Birgit Anderson, Joan Schultz, Madame Stefan, and more. They all deserve loud and sustained shout-outs. But the one I’ll mention here — not because she was a better than the others, but because she’s so representative of them — is Barbara Hare, teacher of Greek Way, an elective English class about Greek mythology (whose principal text, of course, was Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way).
Mrs. Hare loved the subject matter with remarkable, irresistible intensity. This woman was a prim blue-blood with a helmet of hair, an elegantly sober wardrobe, and a rigid sense of propriety. From a financial perspective, I’m pretty sure she didn’t need to teach (she lived on a quasi-estate in neighboring Wayzata), but she was a born educator on a mission from God (sorry, the gods) to make sure her students understood just how friggin’ awesome Greek mythology was.
A 15-year-old kid with big glasses and goofy smile walks in to 10th grade English class pretty unsure of himself. The boy still dreams of being a professional tennis player, the idea not quite dawning on him that the list of 5-foot-5 Jewish men who have won Wimbledon is a woefully short one.
The boy has always liked English class, and always loved words. Taught himself how to read through Matt Christopher books and by checking the sports scores in the pages of Newsday.
Writing was fun and easy, but nothing more interesting than that.
Then, on a fall day at the start of sophomore year, the kid walks into the classroom and meets William Gehrhardt. A teacher so full of energy and enthusiasm that he positively bounces around the room, and every time he knocks into something or someone, inspiration and hope begin to grow in the kid.
The teacher has big glasses and his tie is always a little askew, and he’s always, always, smiling.
Mr. Gehrhardt is just one of those infectious people who is impossible to dislike; he tells jokes about Hamlet and makes fun of his own shortcomings, and he somehow finds a way to make every single kid in the class feel like he’s the one today’s lesson is for.
I don’t think being an educator is easy. There are endless things to explain and supplies to buy and research to complete. On the collegiate level, there is the pressure to publish — and often. But there are some who just flow through the lessons, really enjoying the experience of transferring hard-earned knowledge from their head to yours.
I was lucky to have many wonderful professors during my time at Claremont. At a small college, you are granted the gift of more attention and time. But one stood out.
Audrey Bilger was my Lit 10 professor. It’s a course every freshman has to take. It’s that first course where you first learn to write critically and are exposed to lots of books.
 |  |  |  |
Francis Nine, Ponca City Senior High School
Jay Criche, Lake Forest High School
Sally Cullen, Marshall Junior High
Nadine Cole, Academy of Ballet Arts
Mrs. Starr, Streams Elementary School
Mr. Dauplaise, Washington Junior High
Mr. Anderson, Vol State Community College
Joseph Castka, Martin Van Buren High School
Mr. Randy Rusk, Snider High School
cars: The process of car shopping can be lengthy. You ha...
Rent to Own Homes Decatur Dekalb: Lauren- If the "appraisal" is so low why worry abo...
abs: It's really a great and helpful piece of info. I a...
kerja sampingan: Fantastic publish, very informative. I wonder why ...
can dien tu, cân điện tử: Unquestionably consider that that you said. Your f...
© 2013 Teacher Love. All rights reserved.
Site design by 
