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#closednotclosed, #thankateacher, Memoir, Prince of Tides, reading, Teacher Appreciation Week 2020, Teaching, Thank a teacher, Writing
There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.
I won’t be the only one to invoke Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides during Teacher Appreciation Week this year. We should honor our teachers and their craft. They’re exhausted – and after three school years navigating multiple challenges and crises wrought by COVID – under-appreciated. Millions of them learned to teach from their homes, to harness the power of whatever technology was available to them to maintain a connection with their students, many of whom they didn’t see for months, many of whom dropped out. Teachers improvised – with phone calls and postcards and hand-written letters to the families without access to home computers and the online Zoom classrooms reminiscent of the Brady Bunch grid.
Good teachers know that the most important subject in a school is their students. They understand that all students enter the classroom – online or off – with the same basic needs – to feel safe, to learn, to matter. Some children, especially those struggling during the pandemic with hunger or poverty or an unsafe home, will remember the schools and teachers who went above and beyond to make sure they made it through. As Henry Adams once said about a teacher’s effect on eternity.
He can never tell where his influence stops.
Come away with me to the classroom with your favorite teacher’s name on the door. You know the one. Maybe it was the teacher who knew you were really good at art and entered your drawing in a contest without telling you. Maybe it was the kindly English teacher who cut you some slack when you didn’t finish a book report because your mother was in the hospital, and who you overheard one day tell a student during detention, “You will never earn enough money to do a job you do not love. Never.” Or maybe it was the history teacher who, decades later, is the reason why your mind drifts to the fields of the Antebellum South every time you use a cotton ball.
Each of us should have this extraordinary teacher.
For me, it was Mr. Jones, my English teacher. A teenager when I first encountered him, I knew nothing about pedagogy, but because of him, I learned what great teaching looked like. It looked like Mr. Jones in his classroom every day at Antrim Grammar School. Then a young man at the beginning of his career, he wore a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and on its lapel, a “Save the Otter” button. Naturally, he was well-read, but more importantly, he was accessible. The best reader in the room, be brought vividly to life Chaucer’s Pardoner and other questionable characters, knowing the bawdy exchanges that would most appeal to our adolescent sensibilities. With impeccable timing, he knew when we’d had our fill of Richard Church’s Over the Bridge or the Great Expectations of Charles Dickens. And, at such times, he would pause to wax philosophical or tell us to underscore in red great chunks of text we should learn by heart:
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
For emphasis, he would add “Great stuff!”
Every time.
Mr. Jones created a classroom that was a place of hope during often hopeless and harrowing days in 1970s Northern Ireland. The daughter of working-class parents who pushed me to do well in school, I was the first in the extended family to pass the 11+ exam that gained me a spot at Antrim Grammar, the posh school, where the headmaster and teachers showed up to morning assembly in Hogwarts-style black gowns. Insecure and unsure of my place there, I loved how Mr. Jones took us away from all that, indulging with good humor, our wrong answers and red herrings and the questions we were never afraid to ask. I remember one day I raised my hand to ask what “pre-Raphaelite” meant, and I jotted down the definition in the margin of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. A few minutes later, I raised my hand to ask if I could go to the toilet, and when I returned to the classroom, Mr. Jones asked – but not unkindly – if I had looked in the mirror to consider if perhaps I too had pre-Raphaelite features like the coquettish Eustacia Vye. Of course I had looked in the mirror. I also remember the day I said out loud that I was surprised one of the women in the novel had turned out to be “that type of woman,” and Mr. Jones, glasses balanced on his head, looked right at me and said, “Yvonne, there is no type. Remember that.” I have never forgotten it.
In these seemingly random conversations, Mr. Jones revealed to us a little of his life beyond the classroom and his taste in music – Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Jackson Browne – thereby influencing my own. He even let me borrow his records. But then back to business, he would painstakingly guide us through the required reading for O-level and A-level English exams, the routines and rituals of his classroom elevating an ordinary space into a place of possibility. Every. Single. Day.
Conversely, I also encountered teachers who didn’t seem to like children very much – the strident PE teacher who watched as we showered and questioned the validity of notes our mothers had written to excuse us from swimming because we were menstruating. She even asked for evidence. There were teachers who used sarcasm and big words as they undermined working class parents who lacked a formal education but more than made up for it with hard work and a desire to know the things to do and say that would help ensure their children a place at university, a competitive edge in a world foreign to them. Parents like mine.
When I think back to my parents observing their university-bound daughter, I am reminded of something Seamus Heaney once told Dennis O’Driscoll:
Even Belfast was far away to me. In those days, I was outside the loop, my family had no familiarity with universities, no sense of the choices that there were, no will to go beyond the known procedures, no confidence, for example, about phoning up the local education authority and seeking clarification about what was possible – no phone, for God’s sake.
From this vantage point, my mother – my first teacher – took pride in all aspects of our education, from sewing labels on our uniforms to “backing” our textbooks. I can see her in my mind’s eye, at our kitchen table, late one September evening after our first day back at school. One at a time, she places each of our new books carefully on the middle of a sheet of brown parcel paper. With a few quick snips, folds, and tucks, she has it covered, ready for us to write our names on the front.
One September, because she was ill and in the hospital, I took it upon myself to back my new history textbook. Like so many things, this was something my mother had made look easy. Clumsy, I could not fit the brown paper neatly under the spine at both ends, so I gave up and went to school, my book un-backed. For my sins, I was subjected me to a memorably sarcastic tirade from a teacher who made me stand up while he berated me in front of everyone, told me I was useless, and that he didn’t want to hear another word about my mother in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. She may as well have been on the other side of the world in that instant, and almost 50 years later, I can still feel the sting of embarrassment on my face.
I never forgave him.
In the classroom across the hall, however, and because of Mr. Jones, I mattered, and I knew that I mattered. This might explain why I became a teacher and remained a teacher for so many years, driven I suppose by the hope that kids in my classroom might feel they mattered too.
By the time I had spent more than a decade as a teacher, Mr. Jones had moved on to s new teaching post at Friends School in Lisburn. It makes me smile to consider the possibility that, on the same day, Mr. Jones and I might have been introducing our respective students on either side of the Atlantic, to Robert Frost’s Birches.
Years later, curious about where his career had taken him, and hoping to connect with him so I could say thank you, I searched online, where I found in the Friends Summer 2012 Newsletter a tribute to my favorite teacher, now middle-aged and retired
Mr Terry Jones, Senior Teacher, joined the staff at Friends’ from Antrim Grammar School as Head of the English Department in 1996. At the heart of his teaching was an abiding love of literature, an endless enthusiasm for books and reading, that enriched and enlivened all in his classroom over the years. At the heart of his work in school were kindness, warmth and good sense – qualities that drew the best from pupils and fostered the good relationships so important in our community. A man with many interests, those good relationships extended throughout the staff at Friends’ and Terry Jones was a most highly valued colleague and friend. Calm and steadfast in upholding what is really important in education, Terry Jones made an immense contribution and his example will be a pattern for those who worked with him here in years to come. There is no doubt that retirement will be busy and fulfilling and Terry Jones has our thanks and very best wishes for the future.
At the heart of his work were kindness, warmth, and good sense – the likes of which we saw from teachers everywhere during COVID-19. Perhaps it took a pandemic for us to notice that good teachers are essential.
Remember to thank one of them this week.
