I taught English and Art for nearly two decades. Over the years, many students passed through the doors of my classroom—some apathetic, some a little lost, some neglected, and some simply angry at the world. But they all left changed. Not just by me, but by the stories, books, and poems we studied together.
I always tried to choose works that would be meaningful to them—pieces that might spark their imaginations or speak to something they were feeling. Stories that might offer an escape, because we all need one from time to time. Especially when you’re a student in a Title I school in rural Southwest Alabama.
The other day I went for coffee with a friend. We sat with our laptops, each working on our books (she’s a writer too), when someone walked in who looked oddly familiar. As a former teacher, this happens to me often. Names escape me, but I rarely forget a face, no matter how the years may have changed it.
The young woman looked at me a few times, started to leave, then turned back.
“I thought I recognized that voice,” she said.
And yes, my voice is distinctive—think Sally Field in Steel Magnolias. I am unabashedly a Southern belle.
She smiled and told me that I was the reason she loved Edgar Allan Poe.
That touched me more than anything else that happened that day. To know that I had made an impact on a student, that I had helped inspire a love of great literature that stayed with her all these years… it gratified me. It humbled me. Most of all, it made me smile.
I suppose I’ll always be a teacher. And in truth, I still am—I teach college students now. But whenever I run into one of my former students and hear something like that, it takes me back to those classrooms of my past. I see those young faces looking up at me again, searching for guidance, eager to learn. Sponges in need of water.
Those were some of the best—and also some of the most challenging—years of my life.
And in many ways, the work continues. I may not always be standing at the front of a classroom anymore, but stories are still at the center of what I do. The same love of literature I once tried to pass on to my students now finds its way into the books I write.
Perhaps that’s the real gift of teaching. The lessons don’t end when the bell rings. They carry forward, quietly, through the stories we share and the lives we touch along the way.