For all the teachers I have ever loved

I once volunteered to help pin new university grads into their gowns and for most of the morning the conversation hovered in the you-must-be-so-excited/yes-I-really-am zone. But there was a brief exchange with one young woman that still haunts me:

“Hey, you must be so excited!”

Shoulder shrug. Eye roll. Sigh.

“What? C’mon, you’re not stoked about knocking off your business degree?”

“I really wanted to be a teacher. But my parents said they'd only pay for me to be a pharmacist or a banker.”

So on this first day back to school, let me say to all the teachers I have ever loved—and to the ones I have never met, but who show up day after day full of passion and purpose—thank you for following your true calling. I hope it’s a really good year for you.

My daughter, herself a teacher, says it's a  “hidden harvest” profession. You never really get to know the difference you made in someone's life.

So let me tell you.

In Grade 1, Iris Johnson taught me how to write with my left hand so I didn’t smudge the page. She actually took me aside and, on her own time, taught me italic handwriting—this in the age of the MacLean Method and teachers who believed lefties should be “converted”. This was a huge gift. I loved her so much I used to have dreams in which I would be hugging my mother and she would morph into Miss Johnson. 

In Grade 6, Audrey Goodridge told me not only that I could write—but that “writer” was a viable career option. This was powerful permission. I also think she knew I was cheating my way through the stupid SRA reading-and-comprehension program in order to get to the pay-off of “free reading”—that is, reading things that actually interested me. (For the record, this is good teaching.) I visited her in a nursing home on her 93rd birthday and she remembered me—and my mom and my sister and brother, who were never even in her class. 

In Grade 7, Mary Manning taught me to play Creedance Clearwater Revival and Peter, Paul and Mary songs on a guitar—a skill that later helped me pay my way through university. She also introduced me to some important concepts that caused a bit of trouble at the dinner table, but informed the rest of my life—“feminism” and “equality” and “reproductive freedom” being among them. 

In Grade 9, I had the teacher trifecta: Marion Stroet for French (merci Madame!); Kay Szabo for English (really a disguised ethics course); and Mr. Chalmers who only hinted at the crime of Indian Residential Schools, but didn’t hold back on the Beothuk genocide in Newfoundland. Oh, and I also learned to touch-type from Mr. Cunningham, whose passion for A Quick Brown Fox at 120 wpm became my passion. 

In Grade 11, and then again in Grade 12, I was in the thrall of the beautiful, powerful and wise Angela Waber, who eventually did what all gifted teachers eventually do and became a principal. She taught me that I was good but could always be better, and that there were many more "ways of knowing" than I had ever fathomed. She taught me the fine line between wise-assery and smart humour. She was my first real editor and taught me there were serious consequences to missing a deadline—helpful preparation for an eventual career in journalism.

These women and men are my personal royalty; I bow to all of them. 

Class dismissed.