Who Was YOUR Favorite Teacher?

Who was your favorite teacher when you were growing up? And why can you remember them, even today?

Mine was a high school language arts teacher, Susan Stolen. What I usually tell people is that she showed me both the value and the reward of reading literature. I remember both Ordinary People (by Judith Guest) and Catcher in the Rye (by J.D. Salinger) from her 10th grade English class. Before that class, I would have described both books as boring. I wasn’t interested in reading about everyday life. I liked murder mysteries and spy novels. My favorite book at the time was The Devil’s Alternative, by Frederick Forsyth-- a political thriller about Cold War espionage and assassination. But Mrs. Stolen opened my eyes to how a book about regular life, and regular people, could also contain gripping drama and stay-up-late-to-finish plot twists. I still remember some of the discussions we had about the books in her class even now, decades later. I still like murder mysteries, spy novels, science fiction, and more. But she gave me a lifelong appreciation for a much wider range of stories.

That’s the explanation I usually give people, and every word of it is true. But I think now that there’s a deeper and more personal reason Mrs. Stolen had such an impact on me. Beyond gaining experience with a richer reading of a new kind of book, I connected with her and her class because she treated us students as real people; as equals; as adults. And I don’t mean that there were no rules in her class, or that we were personal friends with her, or that she overshared her private life. I mean that she talked to us, and with us, as if we were peers; as a group of people having an intelligent conversation about an interesting topic. Her way of relating to students made a big impression on me, and has stuck with me every since.

We give a lot of attention to worrying and arguing about the many things that necessarily surround public education here in East Penn today, like the budget and taxes, the books allowed in the library, the bus schedules, whether this or that program should be adopted, and more. So much attention, in fact, that it’s easy to forget the most fundamental and important thing most people remember about their years in school: The handful of teachers who had a meaningful impact on them and their outlook on the world. At a time when teachers are increasingly pulled away from students to fill out data forms and attend administrative meetings, it’s worth remembering that the single most important ingredient in education is the direct and personal relationships formed between teachers and students. This is why issues like class size, teacher morale, time use in the classroom, and fostering human connections in school are critical even when other issues dominate our attention. Mrs. Stolen couldn’t have had those conversations with me in 10th grade English if she’d had 30 students in the room and three different standardized tests to prep for that week.

So what teachers do you remember best from your time in school? Why did they have such an impact on you that you can still recall their names and stories about them even today? Please share your answers in the comments below. How fun would it be to have a big collection of such stories that illustrate what matters most in a quality education?

PS: I’m also mindful that both these books that made such an impression on me with Mrs. Stolen were frequent targets of book censorship efforts in years past. Catcher in the Rye was the most frequently censored book in American high schools for almost twenty years (between 1961 and 1982). Ordinary People was in the top 100 most frequently banned books throughout the 1990s. In both cases, book banners cited “sexual” and “inappropriate” content as the reasons the novels should be censored. Sound familiar?