Dear Teacher

My French-Canadian couch surfer, Lino, and I were talking about our lives and education last night, and it was on my mind this morning when I was at work. Waiting on phone calls to come in, I started looking up things from my high school years, including the website of the first high school I went to in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.

I don't think the school had a website when I was there in the late '90s as a freshman and sophomore, and even now it's a fairly shitty one. There isn't a lot on there, but there are staff pictures, so I was browsing through and looking at the teachers there. I remembered a handful--the math teacher who oversaw the math club I was on (YES, it's been established I'm a mega dork, shut it), the teacher who taught me AP European history and whom I always disliked because she was such a bitch and whose class I only passed because I copied one of my best friend's homework every day, the Spanish teacher who started crying in the middle of a lecture because the plight of the indigineous people of South America was generally terrible.

There was also a picture of my favorite science teacher ever, a woman whose classes I took and whose books I borrowed when I became a student aide. She had a huge menagerie in her biology classroom--parakeets, frogs, guinea pigs, fish, pythons, iguanas, chameleons, hamsters, a hedgehog who would throw up every time you picked him up--and was pretty indulgent to me as her aide. I was there during her break period, so sometimes I could nap, sometimes I'd watch TV (I think I watched the Columbine shooting unfold on her classroom TV), I made her a poster that said "Gravity: Not just a good idea, it's the law."

I got psyched, seeing that she was still teaching there, so I got her e-mail address and wrote her an e-mail, saying I hope she remembered me and thanking her for encouraging me and telling her that although I never went to med school, I still knew about symptoms of Marfan's syndrome and toxoplasmosis during the lecture I went to at the med school when none of the first-year students knew the answers.

She wrote back using lots of exclamation points, saying of course she remembered me, and she was on her way to a meeting and would write back in more depth as soon as she could. It made me feel special that she remembered me, even though this was more than 10 years ago, and I hope I made her feel good, knowing that she really was a huge influence. It prompted me to look up the faculty list of the school outside Albuquerque, N.M., where I did my junior year, but none of the names really stand out. (And fuck Enterprise, Alabama. I hated that school, hated my senior year, my journalism teacher thought man walked with dinosaurs, and I have zero desire to contact anyone there.)

The exchange also made me think about teachers from middle school and elementary school. I remember a few teachers--fourth grade, for example--that were fantastic, but now they're untraceable, retired or even (in the case of a band director from middle school) deceased. And then I think, Shit, people my age are teachers now. That's freaky.

My mom is a career elementary school music teacher, and she's still doing it, and I've considered off and on through life that it would be something worth doing. I'm not born to be a teacher or anything, the way my mom is, but I do think I could be a decent one, and it's always floated in my mind as an option in case I get pushed out of journalism. I would never, ever teach journalism, and strangely enough, I think I'd decide against teaching science and would rather do literature or reading or even straight-up English. (My copy editing professor from college would probably faint at the thought of me trying to explain the difference between "lay" and "lie," because I still don't know what the difference is.)

But teachers were always people I (generally) respected, even from a young age, and it's nice to think that maybe if they knew their students as adults who are working toward ambitions, they would respect us, too.