Remembering Influential Teachers

It's Memorial Day, a time when we pause to remember those who have died in the service of our country, as well as those family and friends who are no longer with us. It seems a fitting time, too, to recall those teachers who have played important roles in our lives, perhaps influencing us to become the people we are today or pursue the careers we have chosen.

Most of us can think back to at least one such teacher and, if we're lucky, several. For many people, the most influential teachers were those we had in our youth—in high school, middle school, or even the elementary years. This may be because when we're young, more things are new to us and, consequently, we're more impressionable. Although influential teachers can appear at any time, even well into adulthood, those from our childhoods often have a disproportionately greater effect on our lives, underscoring the importance of teacher excellence in K–12 education.

In my case, I was fortunate to attend a top-notch middle and high school where I had many great teachers. One was a slightly eccentric high school English teacher who was passionate about literature and tried hard to make his students understand how great books written by long-deceased authors could relate to disaffected teenagers of the late 1960s. Mr. Raftery sometimes drew parallels from experiences in his own life or in the lives of those he knew. One particularly memorable story came after the class had read Zorba the Greek. Exhorting us to "live for today," Mr. Raftery told us about someone he knew who had postponed "living life" while pursuing a Ph.D. at our neighboring university. The day after this person received his degree, he died. The moral was clear: If we spent too much time planning and working for the future, we risked dying without ever having lived.

Another influential teacher taught journalism at my high school. Successfully bridging the gap between teacher and friend, Mr. Brasler was one of the school's funniest and most popular teachers, inspiring many students to pursue journalism careers. For those whose home lives were less than ideal, Mr. Brasler's classes and extracurricular activities—the school newspaper and yearbook—were both refuges and bastions of normalcy. Always involved but never too much so, Mr. Brasler often knew or intuited more about students than they did themselves and had great compassion for the difficult circumstances they were sometimes forced to endure.

So on this Memorial Day, here's to you, Mr. Brasler and Mr. Raftery—and to all teachers everywhere who try hard to make a lasting difference in their students' lives.