‘My son loves school because of her’: There are no words for how wonderful teachers are, but we try
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I come from a long line of teachers. My mother, father, grandmother, and a few aunts are all educators. So when I say teachers raised me, I’m not being figurative. They actually changed my diapers, showed me how to cross the street, and taught me how to think for myself. I owe everything to educators, and I’m not alone.
The staff members here at Daily Kos wanted to take this Teacher Appreciation Week to acknowledge the many educators who have directly impacted us. We hope you’ll join us in showing the teachers you know and love some appreciation in the comments.
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As a student, my high school history teacher, Mr. Gunn, was a game-changer for me. After taking U.S. history, I took a semester course he taught on “the Constitution and students’ rights.” He created a series of cases based on, but not identical to, past Supreme Court cases involving students and schools, and had us research the precedents and argue for a side. It was an amazing education in reading carefully and crafting rigorous arguments, and he pushed us to have opinions and defend them, but debate respectfully with each other.
As a parent, I am so grateful for my kid’s kindergarten teachers. It’s a mixed JK/K class, so the kids are at a range of developmental stages, and then the pandemic is a complicating factor since some of the kids have had seriously limited time in group settings and outside the home until this year. In addition to everything he’s learning, I am blown away by the level of warm, concerned, individual attention my kid is getting, and the way his teachers have shown they really understand who he is. And not just his classroom teacher and paraprofessional, but the librarians, who on day one got his buy-in on the excitement of checking out a book every week. The gardening teacher. His afterschool teachers who come up with fun activities—active body, medium body, and quiet body—week after week. This has been such a challenging couple years for teachers and kids alike, and from everything I have seen, teachers have risen to the occasion in heroic ways.
Adrienne Crezo:
I never took a class with her, but my great-grandma, Dorothy Sunrise Lorentino, was my favorite teacher. As a child, she won a landmark education case that made public schools in the U.S. accessible to Native students, setting a precedent cited in Brown v. Board of Education. She then spent the rest of her life learning and teaching others. She was a special education teacher at a number of schools in New Mexico, Arizona, and Oregon, working primarily with ESL and disabled students. In 1997, she became the first Native American and first Oklahoman National Teacher of the Year when she was inducted into the National Teachers Hall of Fame. She’s an important figure in our Comanche history, in the history of education in the U.S., and in my life as I try to learn from her example and make the world a little more equitable.
I’ve had a lot of impactful and important teachers growing up, but one of the most important ones was John Gunn, my ninth and tenth grade advisory, and humanities teacher. I went to an alternative public school in New York and so advisory was sort of like a more robust “homeroom.” Your advisor teacher kept tabs on your progress across the board. John was great in many ways, but I will always remember how well he was able to zero in and ask me very simple questions that struck the perfect chord of not making me defensive, while also pointing out how naive many of my assertions were at that point in my very young intellectual life.
My very very impactful teacher was Carolyn Oubre, who taught me at Xavier University Preparatory School in NOLA. She was my English IV and English AP teacher. She taught me so much curiosity and critical reading skills, how language evolved, how to study media for themes, symbolism, and subtext. I grew such an appreciation for language and its nimbleness. I was already something of a writer before she got to me, but she thoroughly upped my game and the stakes. AND she brought texts alive. We would be reading Shakespeare like it was “The Young and the Restless.”
The two most important teachers in my life are people who so many want to contend are not teachers. In my own state, after repeated attempts to fund them, we still look down on funding special education paraprofessionals. Without two paraprofessionals as part of my life, I do not know where I would be, or where my children would be right now.
In my son’s early education, special education was difficult. He couldn’t tolerate loud noises, he didn’t like hearing or seeing other people eat, and he needed to wash his hands repeatedly. It’s funny because today, that might be a good thing, but at the time, a child washing their hands for three or four minutes in a row was not condoned. Teachers offered the lessons; the paraprofessionals put them into action. When my son struggled to write due to fine motor skill issues, they talked to him and made him feel okay about typing and succeeding at something he could handle. Holding a pencil? That was tough. Typing on a keyboard? He could do it. They offered to take him out after school to see local events to broaden his horizon. When a paraprofessional learned that we were struggling at home with his lack of sleep, a paraprofessional offered to sit with our son at night to provide my family respite.
These paraprofessionals provided the services that made for a young man who wanted to achieve.
My high school English teacher, Ms. Jorgenson at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C., instilled in me a love of reading. She was kind, and inspiring, and inclusive and made everyone in our class feel like what we had to say was important. I’ll never forget her.
I could list teachers for days who have helped me along the way, but the one who has had the most direct affect on my life recently is my son’s preschool teacher, Ms. Bracy. It was clear from his first day in her class that this was not a person just collecting a check. This was an educator who truly loves children. She had my son sit directly next to her on his first day and was patient with him during the months it took him to warm up. She cooks with her students, carves pumpkins with them, and makes Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards with them. My son loves school because of her, and she makes all of our lives that much easier. Really, all the teachers at his school do. My daughter’s teachers just love her to death, too, and they work so hard to make sure she is well taken care of, from changing her multiple times a day to teaching her new dance moves, which she very much so appreciates. (If you’ve never heard this song before, thank my daughter’s teachers later for the introduction.)
So many of my educators were instrumental in shaping my life, from the high school teachers who helped me leave an abusive parent for foster care, to the college professor who talked me out of getting an MBA, to the grad school professors who shepherded my early career. But the first truly transformative teacher, the only teacher I’ve abused Google to track down, was the one who led me through second grade. My elementary school lumped the so-called “gifted” kids into two-grade classrooms, and Miss Seaman cultivated our curiosities, noticed our struggles, catered to our unique needs and interests, and always managed to do it with a sense of humor I remember to this day.
We were even in a short film together when I was 7! In Being Gifted: The Gift, I essentially played a version of myself—an annoyingly precocious kid—and she did the same, portraying a loving, thoughtful teacher. We may not have been great actors, but I remember her presence easing my discomfort amid the lights and cameras. Thirty years later, I spoke to the director. She told me it was Miss Seaman who promised the director that she had the “perfect kid” for the role, and it was she who convinced my mother to let me audition!
When I reached out to Miss Seaman (who’s long since become a Mrs.) eight years ago, it meant so much to me to hear that, despite teaching dozens of students per year, for 26 years, she vividly remembered me; she described me as “a wonderful spark to [her] school days.” We’ve fallen out of touch, but thanks to this challenge, I put a card of appreciation in the mail for her today!
Alisha Taylor:
My sixth grade math teacher, Gretchen Cullen, was amazing. She found ways to motivate us to learn more in a subject that many hate: algebra. She gave us “paw points” when we did extras. One that I remember was memorizing the first 30 numbers of pi. We’d trade in our points for prizes, one of which was lunch with her. I saved up all year to have a special pizza lunch with her and spent the entire time hammering her with questions, which she graciously answered. I’ve never forgotten her and believe that she was my inspiration for obtaining a Masters in Accounting. I wanted to be just like her: graceful, kind, generous, and inspirational.
Please keep this list going and shout out your favorite teachers in the comments!