In 1972, I returned to Miami Beach High School to speak to

the drama class. Afterward I asked the drama teacher if any of my

English teachers are still there. Irene Roberts, he tells me, is

in the class just down the hall.

I was no one special in Miss Roberts’ class – just another

jock who did okay work. I don’t recall any one special bit of

wisdom she passed on. Yet I cannot forget her respect for

language, for ideas and for her students. I realize now, many

years later, that she is the quintessential selfless teacher. I’d

like to say something to her, I say, but I don’t want to pull her

from a class. Nonsense, he says, she’ll be delighted to see you.

The drama teacher brings Miss Roberts into the hallway where

stands this 32-year-old man she last saw at 18. “I’m Mark

Medoff,” I tell her. “You were my 12th-grade English teacher in

1958.” She cocks her head at me, as if this angle might conjure

me in her memory. And then, though armed with a message I want to

deliver in some perfect torrent of words, I can’t think up

anything more memorable than this: “I want you to know,” I say,

“you were important to me.”

And there in the hallway, this slight and lovely woman, now

nearing retirement age, this teacher who doesn’t remember me,

begins to weep; and she encircles me in her arms.

Remembering this moment, I begin to sense that everything I

will ever know, everything I will ever pass to my students, to my

children, is an inseparable part of an ongoing legacy of our

shared wonder and eternal hope that we can, must, make ourselves

better.

Irene Roberts holds me briefly in her arms and through her

tears whispers against my cheek, “Thank you.” And then, with the

briefest of looks into my forgotten face, she disappears back

into her classroom, returns to what she has done thousands of

days through all the years of my absence.

On reflection, maybe those were, after all, just the right

words to say to Irene Roberts. Maybe they are the very words I

would like to speak to all those teachers I carry through my life

as part of me, the very words I would like spoken to me one day

by some returning student: “I want you to know you were important

to me.”

By Mark Medoff

from A 4th Course of Chicken Soup for the Soul

Copyright 1997 by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Hanoch

McCarty & Meladee McCarty

– Mark Medoff