…is one who can share a passion and spark a desire in at least some students to know more about what is being taught. Those are the teachers who can truly change the way you look at the world. I’ve had a few, most notably an English teacher I wrote about earlier, Miss S.
Another was Mrs. M., a middle-aged, dark-haired teacher. When I look at yearbook pictures of her I’m struck by her beauty. For us, of course, it was hidden behind the regulation short perm and cat-eyed glasses worn by women of that age in the nineteen-seventies.
Only long after she was gone, when I taught English classes myself, did I realize how much work Mrs. M. had put into striving to wake up the pointedly bored teenagers in her afternoon periods. She even read us some of Richard Armour’s Classics Reclassified, a funny take on assigned reading materials. “Melville died in New York on September 28, 1891, blissfully unaware that, in the years to come, so many people would leave the hyphen out of ‘Moby-Dick.”
Pam Troy 