And the Best Teachers Are ...

In my student days I had a few of them--great teachers. And, to be honest, I didn't always realize they were great until later--sometimes years later--when I'd had a chance to think about it, when I'd become a teacher myself and realized what they'd done--and how they'd done it.

The other night Joyce and I were talking about this very thing--and thinking about what it is that makes a teacher great.

I came up with this: Great teachers are those who care (about their students, about their subject), those who work hard, those whose enthusiasm becomes infectious. (Not a great word to use these coronavirus days.)

I don't want to go through all of these (if my patience is limited, then I'm positive that yours is). But I do want to talk a bit about caring about the subject.

Those teachers who did so stood out in my school days, for I had lots of teachers who didn't really seem to care--who weren't all that qualified for what they were teaching--who didn't seem to maintain in their private lives the passion for the subject they were teaching.

We've all had such folks, right? People who just went through the motions? Who saw teaching as a job, not a profession, not a calling, not a passion?

And I have to say that I taught with a few men and women like that, too. People who did the minimum, people for whom the end of the day meant the end of thinking about their classes, their kids.

But those teachers whom I admired when I was a kid--those teachers whom I admired as a colleague--were of quite a different species.

Let me pick one from my years at Hiram High School (1958-62), Augustus H. Brunelle, who taught me Latin I and II, German I, and English II and III. (He retired the year before I graduated.)

I didn't always appreciate Mr. Brunelle back then. He gave us a lot of work; he knew when we had produced something less than our best; he had a bit of a temper; he was, well, scholarly. (Years later, I learned he'd all but earned his Ph.D. in classical languages--but off he went to WWI, and when he'd come back, the faculty had changed, his thesis topic was no longer approved, and, having no desire to start over, he began his long career as a teacher.)

Mr. Brunelle was the Real Thing. He read all the time; he introduced us to writers I would later learn to love (Dylan Thomas, for example); he tolerated our (my?) difficulties with Shakespeare (it took some years before that hook finally snagged me); he was genuinely enthusiastic about what he taught.

The same with Dr. Abe C. Ravitz at Hiram College (1962-66). He read voraciously, knew about the lives and times of the writers he taught, helped us see the connections among writers and writers, among works and works. There was never the slightest doubt about this: He cared.

At when I began teaching at the middle school in Aurora (fall, 1966), I met some amazing colleagues who embodied these virtues--people whom I greatly admired and learned to love--people whose classes were workshops on how to teach well, workshops that showed there was more than one way to be effective.

Mrs. Kutinsky ("Mrs. K.," the kids called her), a 6th grade science teacher whose room itself could teach more than some people I knew. Animals all round (yes, snakes, too)--evidence that science was not a "class" but a way of looking at the world. I've told the story before about how she (who ran a farm--and still does, in her 90s) brought a cow to school, kept it there for a while (she lived in her camper parked nearby), teaching the kids how to milk and care for the creature. It was astonishing.

Or Mr. Kmetz, the fabulous art teacher (now, sadly, deceased), who had a wild sense of humor but who saw in kids the talent that they themselves had not even known was there. He devoted himself  to his students--buying lunches for those who had little money--even, sometimes, clothing, shoes. He was also a wonderful dancer and choreographed many shows I directed. His contributions were always the most beautiful things about those shows.

And there were so many others. And from Day One I wanted to be like them--and I watched and borrowed and stole and adhered to them like a barnacle.

So it was principally because of them that I grew to love my profession. By watching them, I had discovered a couple of very basic principles:The more you pour into your classroom, the more comes out in the end. And the more you care--the harder you work--the harder they work. And the more they learn, the more you learn. And the "job" morphs into something else, something ... amazing.