by Jason Byassee, May 7, 2014
Jason Byassee
May is Teacher Appreciation month. It is a good time to reach back out to teachers who influenced and blessed and loved us well. It is also a good time for our church to think about the God-given goodness of the vocation of teaching. Each week in May we’ll interview one of our teachers about their work and the ways they find God in it. I hope we’ll all learn more about the richness of the body of Christ of which we are all a part.
Tracy Smith
New York Times best-selling author Pat Conroy writes
I wanted my teachers to make me smart. A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous. He tells me that teaching is the art of theft: of knowing what to steal and from whom. Bad teachers do not touch me; the great ones never leave me. They ride with me during all my days, and I pass on to others what they have imparted to me. I exchange their handy gifts with strangers on trains, and I pretend the gifts are mine. I steal from the great teachers. And the truly wonderful thing about them is they would applaud my theft, laugh at the thought of it, realizing they had taught me their larcenous skills well.
What got you into teaching?
I always loved school. It was a safe place for me. I had excellent teachers who challenged me, loved me, nurtured me, read to me, and prepared me to think about a future that included college.
I found a sanctuary when I started school. I had access to colorful books, a clean classroom with shiny, waxed linoleum floors, and a warm meal at lunchtime. I was poor, but public education was free, and at a very early age, I somehow decided not to waste a priceless opportunity.
Rather than looking at my unfashionable clothes and hairstyle and imposing on me labels like “unfortunate” or “under-resourced,” most of my teachers saw the potential hidden inside me. My teachers challenged me to learn all that I could. Because of their encouragement and support, I received scholarships to fund my bachelor’s degree. I graduated with a B.A. degree in Secondary English Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And I became a teacher, too.
Tell me about a teacher you admired.
Sorry, I have two…
In third grade, every day before lunch, Mr. Ferguson would ask us to sit in a circle around his rocking chair, and he would read aloud to us. I have such vivid and fond memories of
Mr. Ferguson reading aloud to the class and bringing to life E.B. White’s barnyard tale of an unlikely friendship between a pig and a spider. Mr. Ferguson gave me a wonderful gift that year: love of reading. Antoine de Saint Exupery, author of The Little Prince once wrote, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” I longed for those 30 minutes, sitting at the feet of my teacher while he made stories come to life.
I was fortunate enough to have a high school English teacher who was an academic–she held a Ph.D. in English from Duke. She was a scholar who focused her work on her students’ learning. She studied our needs in order to challenge us. She was well-read and intelligent. She was the smartest person I had ever met. But somehow she made me believe I was smart, too.
I remember sitting in Dr. Eggers’s English class during my senior year of high school. I was a bit uneasy because she expected so much from me and from all my peers. She challenged us in a way that no other teacher had. I was not sure I could deliver. But she was. At that time, I didn’t even know what a Ph.D. was. No one in my family had ever even attended a university. Still, I remember thinking, “I don’t know what a Ph.D. is, but I’m going to get one someday.” In 1999, I was awarded a Ph.D. (with distinction) in Curriculum and Teaching. I returned to my high school and taught high school English with Dr. Eggers. She was my department chair, and still an inspiration, still my teacher.
In one class period per day, in one school year, her influence changed my life forever.
To be continued….