A Teacher is…
When someone asks you to finish the statement: “a teacher is”…, you probably recall those men and women hired by various school boards or college boards during that period of time that you were officially labeled student . However when you do that, you are leaving out a host of candidates who might deserve to be called teacher even more than one of those who was a product of a teacher training course.
A teacher is someone who teaches. There only needs to be a teacher and a learner. The teacher might teach you how to put a worm on a hook; my father did such a good job of teaching me that that for years I amazed my friends by cooly working various types of worms and insects securely on to hooks as observers eeked and yucked off to the side.
A teacher might teach you to bake Grandma’s special applesauce cake. My mom did that so well that when my brothers invite me to any family dinner, they always remind me to bake “Grandma Ramsey’s Applesauce Cake.” Their wives just never caught on even though my mother gave them the recipe several times.
That teacher might teach you scales and arpeggios and even lend you books from her personal library: Elsie Dinsmore, Grace Livingston Hill, and many others. Esther Dykema moved to Matewan, West Virginia, with her engineer husband Leonard, who worked at the local radio station until he moved on to Florida to work for NASA. She made being a talented pianist and working hard at it desirable to an eight year old girl.
There were teachers in the school system who stand out to me also. Anne Roberson, my seventh grade science teacher, conveyed her love of learning to her students through her enthusiasm for all kinds of learning. She taught us why soap washes our hands clean. She explained about emulsifiers. She even taught us to be patient with our daddies who might leave the bathroom sink a mess after hurriedly shaving before leaving for work in the morning. I remember these lessons because she made them seem worth knowing.
There was Mrs. Vinciguerra who made me feel worthwhile as a writer. Mrs. Talbert who taught me to revise what I had written. Mr. O’Dell who opened up some of those mysteries of biology and made me student of the week so often that I felt talented. There were others, on the other hand, who only taught me that life is not always fair, who were uninterested and uninteresting, so a better question to answer might be “an intentional teacher is…”,and I could reply “someone who intentionally uncovers some previously unknown thing that the student wants to know as compared to those teachers who just cover materials and teach not at all what they intended but place the blame on those “uninterested” students.
