In Praise of Teachers
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