(MENAFN- Gulf Times) What you remember about your teachers might have little connection to the lessons they'd planned.
When my husband brushes up against me in the kitchen or as we're unloading groceries from the car, he'll refer to those unexpected encounters as "Miss Squillante" moments.
Miss Squillante was his third-grade teacher. She was the first adult female to capture his romantic imagination. In that imagination, he brushed up against his pretty young teacher without her knowing; these were the dreams of the elementary school child who from an early age had an eye for Italian women. (That she was lively, clever and kind didn't hurt.)
More than 60 years later, Michael still invokes his teacher in a way Miss Squillante might not recognise. The tiny flame is still there, like a votive candle to the innocent desires of a schoolboy.
After more than 30 years in the classroom, I still model myself on the teacher I had for first and second grades: Mrs Pruitt was the most welcoming, most generous and most creative teacher that a bright little girl from an uneducated family could have.
My parents both were forced to leave school after the eighth grade and remained as intimidated by teachers as they were by priests. They walked my brother and me to the gates and hoped we'd be improved by the time they came to pick us up.
But Mrs Pruitt saw in the dark, messy-haired and grubby little kid I was an appetite for learning so profound I'd skip snack time for a chance to sit close to her desk and draw pictures under her watchful eye.
Having no children, Mrs Pruitt once cheerfully told me that if she'd had a daughter, she'd want her to be just like me. I think I was six years old when the elderly woman (she might have been all of 50) made that pronouncement, but I doubt that more than two-dozen words have carved themselves into my heart more deeply than hers.
In high school, an English teacher named Willa Garnick offered me a haven of intelligent, useful sympathy after my mother's illness and death. Mrs Garnick gave me practical advice and suggested I speak to other adults; she insisted that I needn't carry the burden of tragedy on my shoulders alone, which I wouldn't have believed if she hadn't demonstrated the truth of it through her own actions.
College professors? They were different. You only saw them once or twice a week. Unless you deliberately tunnelled into their faculty warrens and found them running frantically on intellectual wheels of their own devising, you could avoid contact.
But if you looked for them and were willing to prove your value (or show your potential), most professors would return the attention with interest.
I was lucky. Many of my professors were worth seeking out. Early on, I had crushes on a few of the men in front of the lecture hall, but it was the women in the academy who changed my life: They taught me that you didn't have to fall for the person leading the discussion, but that you yourself could be initiating and orchestrating it.
Like good teachers and professors, good students are memorable and transformative. Hundreds of my former students are now teachers, principals, researchers and scholars; in a very real sense, they've become my colleagues.
Kerri Brown, a 2011 UConn graduate who became part of Teach For America and is now a high school teacher in Massachusetts, recently posted on her Facebook page that she'd just had her best teaching day because she "witnessed the moment of the irrevocable - when a student finds THAT book, the one we've all had, the book that first made us hungry, rattled our core and gave us permission to think for ourselves". She posted a photo of her 10th-grader's colour-coded notes and wrote: "This is nothing you could assess with a multiple-choice question - just a kid, a book and endless possibility."
I asked folks for memories of their teachers and hundreds replied. No one mentioned Miss Squillante, Mrs Pruitt or Mrs Garnick by name, but their ineffable presence was everywhere. The best taught us reading, writing, math and that the world is full of endless possibility.
™¦ Gina Barreca is an English professor at the University of Connecticut, a feminist scholar who has written eight books, and a columnist for the Hartford Courant. She can be reached through her www.ginabarreca.com
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