Touching Eternity
 | Author:
Mary Sheehy Moe, Editorial Columnist in Missoula
Nancy Marks: MT43 News Secretary and News Editor |
Touching Eternity
Mary Sheehy Moe
Editorial Columnist in Missoula
Some time ago, I watched a PBS feature about a retired teacher. Flossie Lewis, 90 years old, had returned to her classroom to interact with the now-adults she had taught decades earlier.
One, an architect, told her he tries to create in buildings the poetry her teaching taught him to love.
Another, a lesbian for whom high school had been a lonely, fearful experience, told Flossie, “You saved my life.”
Student after student had a different story but the theme was always the same. As one of them put it, “Everyone else, everything else, back then said ‘No’ to me … but Flossie said ‘Yes.’”
All across this sprawling town with long streets we call Montana, retired teachers like me — or their loved ones — have those interactions now.
“My dad was a teacher. There was standing room only at his funeral. The church was filled with so many of his students. [Afterwards] they recounted the many memories they had of him and the impact he had on their lives.”
“Public speaking scared me to death until I had him,” a current legislator remembered. “He told me, ‘You’re not scared; you’re excited.’ I remember it every time I get up to speak!”
“My mother had a signature technique before students took a tough test or a particularly challenging assignment. She offered ‘smart pills’ that were really merely lemon drop candies. Candy and gum at school were strictly taboo at that time, so this was a memorable event. Mom died several years ago. On one of my Memorial Day visits to the cemetery, I found a little bag of lemon drops on her headstone. Far-reaching impact indeed.”
“I felt completely out of my league until I had her. She made me believe I had talent.”
I think of these things now because if you’re a teacher, no matter how long you’ve been retired, your thoughts go back to the classroom this time of year. Last week, I had a message for students as another school year begins. Teachers, this one’s for you.
I know it’s hard to imagine as you’re sitting there exhausted after just 10 days back, but believe me, on some not-too-distant day, former students will tell you things like those quoted here.
If you don’t believe me, visit the memorial posts for Lockwood choir teacher Quentin Staton, who lost his long, long battle with cancer last month. Appreciation and gratitude all but drip from the screen. Or the Facebook posts on Doug Follett. He hadn’t taught history for nearly 40 years when he died last March, but Columbia Falls students through the decades remembered him as though it were yesterday. His humor. The way he made history fun. Or just the simple, “He saw me.”
Someday, students you taught — maybe this year! — will reach out to tell you that having you as their teacher shaped their life, changed their life, maybe even saved their life. There is no better award than that. So remember:
Every day for the next 170 or so school days, you have the opportunity to switch on a light for someone stumbling through darkness.
Every day, a chance to change someone’s No into Yes, to be the somebody at school who makes a child feel like SOMEBODY at school.
Every day, the experience of shaping the community of tomorrow.
Every day, the opportunity to hear America singing, to make the song beautiful, and to help every single young American in your classroom find his or her own voice in that song.
Teachers, go out and do just that. Just teach. There is no more important job in the world.
