Our music teacher, Mother Ribas, wasn’t really very good as a teacher (sorry, Mother), but our year was… special. She always told us we drover her crazy, specially my class and group D (we were separated in 4 groups, by alphabetical order; I was group C). We had people who were taking official Conservatory lessons, a tone-deaf guy who eventually became a percussionist, and a bunch of people who were neither very good nor very bad but who didn’t gain much from practicing more, since the practice wasn’t really guided individually (see “not really very good as a teacher”).
So when we were prepping for some show and once we’d run through the number twice we’d start running over it. We’d experiment. What happens if I shift it half a tone; what happens if I go faster or slower; how does it sound if I mark each note separately or if I try to blend them as much as possible. Now picture 40 kids each doing his own experiment at the same time.
And then the show would come up and we’d hit it note-perfect. And afterward she’d be pulling her very-short hair and tell us we drove her crazy, nobody did as badly in the rehearsals as we did and nobody did as well in the actual show.
We though she told the same to everybody. Turns out she didn’t. We really drove her nuts. OooooOOOOoooops, SO-RREEEEE!
I’ll never be able to play correctly anything more complicated than palms, but just having those three years of solfege and flute did my ears a world of good. If it hadn’t been for that, I doubt they would have been good for more than holding up my glasses.
Srta Layne Jessie, Spanish I and II, in the late 80s.
I was convinced that I was only taking a foreign language to meet a university entrance requirement and would never use it again. But life has a funny way of challenging my assumptions and about 15 years later I met the future Mrs Iggy while on vacation in Colombia. I hurriedly bought a translation dictionary and fell back on Srta Jessie’s grammar lessons from years before. And somehow it all worked out.
So that mere formality of a university entrance requirement became the most important classes I ever took. And now my Spanish language skills are playing a major role in my life, both at home and professionally.
My second grade teacher who, if alive today, would be approaching 100, honed in on my interest in reading and brought me book after book after book to read. So often, after class, she would say, “I have another one for you”.
Mrs. Downs, 4th grade teacher, ditto. I was already a reader, having been raised by readers, but she cemented the already-there tendency by taking a period each day to read to us, advanced stuff for ten-year-olds, like Kon Tiki.
She also instilled a certain sense of logic. I remember asking to change a dime for two nickles (the Scholastic Book lady was short on change) and she demanded, “Why should I give you these two big nickles for that crummy little dime?” I answered about how the silver in the dime was intrinsically more valuable than the copper and nickel in the nickles. Not sure how I’d answer today, mumble something about expected value, I suppose.
When I was in High School, I took Latin I with the hopes of taking Latin II the next year, but I found out that Latin II was not going to be offered due to lack of interest. I wanted to make sure that I took at least 2 years of a language to make myself more attractive on my college applications, so my junior year, I took Spanish with Mrs. Hoikka. She was awesome! She was a great teacher and really knew how to make learning Spanish fun. She always had fun projects for us. She also had a great sense of humor.
One day in Spanish II she decided she was going to play this game with us. The game was that everyone in class, including her, had to speak only Spanish. The catch was that if anyone spoke English, they would receive the hall pass… and if anyone else spoke English, the pass would move to that person. It would continue that way during class and whoever ended up with the pass at the end of class would get an extra homework assignment. So it went this way for awhile and a few people, including myself, messed up and spoke English, and the pass moved around from person. Then my friend, Charlie, said (in English) that he had to go to the bathroom, so Mrs. Hoikka let him go. When he returned, he had this huge grin on his face, so my friends and I knew he was up to something. Then a few minutes later, a the front office secretary came in on the loudspeaker for the room and said, “Mrs. Hoikka,” and she responded, “Yes?” Then the voice said, “Gotcha!”. We all cracked up, because she ended up with the pass at the end of the hour and nobody got extra homework. She laughed along with us.
That was the kind of teacher she was, and we absolutely loved her.
I’m one of those weird people who doesn’t recall any K-12 teachers who made a big difference in his life.
So a shout-out to Dr. Daniel Farkas of Virginia Tech (he’s been Emeritus for the past dozen years) who taught the baby analysis course I took there back in the early 1980s. He made all the epsilons understandable. Cauchy sequences, Bolzano-Weierstrass, open covers and finite subcovers - I understood all that on account of him.
I was one of 6-7 seniors taking the course. The rest were juniors. She made the course interesting, treated us like adults, and never had any disciplinary problems with us. On the day of final exams, she had all the seniors move up to the front row. Our exam was different from the juniors’. Ours was full of joke questions, and we kept breaking out laughing. The juniors were befuddled, but she kept mum and never let on. I still remember trig concepts to this day, as well as the true art of the prank.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she did remember you and just didn’t want to say. My ex-father-in-law was a high school teacher and he remembers people 30 years later. I ran in to one of his students and he came up somehow and she told me to say hi to him. He still remembered her.
I tried my hand at subbing and was at my old middle school 15 years after I had gotten out and some of the teachers remembered me. Hell one remembered me and I couldn’t remember who HE was.
I had two teachers who were very important in my life and I got to thank both while they were still alive; one still is for that matter and I thank him at least once a year.
The oldest one who I will call Miss Elder (because that was her name) I saw in a local restaurant several years after High School. I thanked her for all she had taught me; not just about English language and literature but about what a good person can do and what makes someone worthwhile to society at large. I also snuck her check and covered it without her knowing (although she would be ashamed of me now 40 years later for still using the word “snuck”).
Mrs. Marks, 6th grade science, West Middle School 79-80.
Not so much a thank you as letting her know that I got what I deserved. I was a rotten student, because I was bored to tears in all my classes. I would read all the “Little House” books under my desk when the class was reading the text or Mrs. Marks was lecturing. I got C’s in school because I did well on tests but couldn’t be bothered to do homework.
How did I get what I deserved? Now I’m a teacher, tearing my hair out over students who don’t work up to their potential.
Purely from the title of the thread, the first teacher for me to thank would be my mum because she taught me to read. I’ve had plenty of chances to thank her though, and have. I joke that it was self defence on her part - I had about a bazillion questions and teaching me to read was the only way she could get a break from them I spent many an hour looking things up in books. We had ~3000 books at home when I was a little boy, which was great. No web in those days, so books were the only source available at any time.
I have unfortunately forgotten the name of the first formal teacher I’d like to thank because I didn’t realise his importance until much later. My O level maths teacher. One day in his class algebra “clicked” for me and I properly understood how to solve quadratic equations. I was rather pleased…and so was he. He’d been teaching maths to children for many years. He must have seen the same thing a thousand times, but it still pleased him.
I remember the name of another teacher I would have liked to thank. Mr Sandyford, who taught Latin (classical Latin and vulgar Latin, to be more precise). It was mandatory at my school to do 5 years of either Latin or ancient Greek. I’d chosen Latin solely because the alphabet was almost the same as English (hardly surprising, since the English alphabet was the Latin alphabet and hasn’t changed very much since the switch from Elder Futhark runes to Latin alphabet). I had no interest in Latin at all when I was 11, but Mr Sandyford made Latin interesting by teaching it with enthusiasm and in context as a living language (which of course is what it was to the people who used it), showing the connections between language and society and also teaching us about ancient Roman history, the history of science and all manner of things. All the way from “Cerberus est canis” to philosophers discussing the possible reasons why the level of water in a pond varied a lot over time, making observations and proposing hypotheses. But also graffiti (which was extremely common in ancient Rome), politics, society and, in general, how to study history. I learnt more important things about history in my Latin classes than I did in my history classes.
I had the same teacher for 1st and 2nd grade (1966-67, she got married between grades so she came back with a different name in 2nd). She was kind and fun to be around.
The spring of 2nd grade I developed peritonitis and sepsis and it was not thought I would survive. She got all the kids to write me get well notes ( I was out for 3 weeks).
We moved that July.
As I grew older I came to really appreciate her.
Swing ahead to around 2001. Internet research is coming to its own and I decide to look her up and thank her. I see she’s teaching in a different school but still under the NYC school system. I dig up a school district phone number and call.
I get a sympathetic secretary who unbelievably tells me that Mrs. X is retiring and that today she cleaned out her stuff and had just left about an hour before I called.
I was crestfallen, and asked if she thought the teacher would ever be in touch again. The secretary said she most likely needs to come back one last time to get any mail she missed. She volunteered to pass my best wishes along, (and she took my name).
I had chosen History of Revolutions instead of boring old Canadian History, so we got to study revolutions, the conditions that form them, and how to tell whether one is imminent. I remember there were seven steps leading to a revolution, and one of them was “people start to mock the establishment”, but I don’t remember what the other ones were. We studied the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Quiet Revolution.
We were looking at the Chinese Revolution during the time when the Gang of Four was in power after Mao died, so it felt ripped from the headlines. We also learned about Norman Bethune and the Long March. When we were looking at the Russian Revolution, that song Rah Rah Rasputin was popular, so that reinforced the lessons. For the Quiet Revolution, we saw the movie Action by Robin Spry, which was an eye-opener for this English Canadian. Now that I think about it, it wasn’t that many years after the actual events in Quebec.
Thank you Mr Esler for opening this kid’s eyes to history!
I’d like to thank my social studies/history/government/civics teachers from 7th to 11th grade. I only had 3 different social studies teachers over those 5 years, but I’d like to think they’d be pretty proud of me for becoming a city council member. I never had any specific interest in government, and was neither a bad nor good student in those subjects. But their classes were memorable and did give me the foundation I need to be able to serve as an elected official 20+ years later.
So many teachers, but to name just one: Mr. Abbamont, whom I had for 7th and 8th grade Social Studies, Grammar (I have no idea why he taught that instead of my English teacher), Cursive, and Humor. (Humor was a minicourse.) Unofficially, he taught the value of precision and accuracy, which are vital to me as a writer. He made his students (or me, anyway) care about doing the assignment correctly even if we didn’t care about the material.
Had an excellent Chemistry teacher in high school. Shoutout to Roger “Papa” Voltz…
Fast forward 30 years, I left the state and had just switched careers, to teaching. Was watching my daughter play soccer and one of the other (much younger) dads asked me why. I mentioned that it was all because of a teacher in an unrelated subject, and asked him what he did. He said “I’m a chemistry teacher. Yep [sigh], all because of Papa Voltz…”
I spent many an hour looking things up in books. We had ~3000 books at home when I was a little boy, which was great. No web in those days, so books were the only source available at any time.