To Teach is to Touch Lives

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.” - Aristotle

There’s always that one teacher. You know the one I’m talking about, he or she brings out the best in you. They push you to be the best you can be and understand that, sometimes, you’re best isn’t it “needs to be”. And they tell you that that’s okay, because it is. They stay after school with you and spend hours to make sure that you understand the material, no matter how “basic” it is. They break it down for you to understand, create little rhymes to help you remember. And most importantly, they don’t treat you like you’re stupid. Everyone has had that teacher. But I’ve been fortunate enough to have several.

The early years of school are the most critical. You develop basic skills that are needed for the rest of your educational career, and the teachers you have are VERY important. My kindergarten teacher was the total package. Mrs. Arroyo was sweet, funny, driven, and loved to teach. I don’t have a whole lot of memories from that long ago, but the things I do remember have shaped not only my educational career, but my life. Mrs. Arroyo always had a smile on her face. Even when I was being a stubborn pain in the butt and going slow on classwork, she stuck with me not just in kindergarten but in the first grade! I was in her first class as a first grade teacher! And that is something I still brag about to this day. Mrs. Arroyo was the first person who pushed me to be the best I could be and that’s something I will always be grateful for.

After leaving Virginia for Illinois, I was worried that I wouldn’t have another amazing teacher. I was wrong. In the third grade, I had the pleasure of being taught by Mrs. Kienlen. Though my time with her was brief, she taught me a lesson that I still remember to this day: I am strong. We were doing an assignment in class and I didn’t understand it. I didn’t want to ask her for help because I was nervous to ask her. You see, Mrs. Kienlen had cancer and was in a wheelchair. I didn’t want to make her go from one side of the room to the other just because I was probably just lacking some common sense. So, I did what I could and handed it in. She looked it over and said, “Almost all of this is wrong. Did you understand it?” I shook my head and she explained it to me. I still didn’t get it, but I went back anyway, tried again, handed it back to her and got the same reaction. I started to shrink back and get quiet, but Mrs. Kienlen just looked at me and said, “Don’t be afraid to tell me that you need help. You are strong, Jordan, you’re strong!” I just nodded my head, I mean, she said it in front of the entire class! She looked at me and said, “Jordan, say it. Say that you are strong.” And I did. I said “I am strong. I am strong.” I said it in front of my entire class. It was so embarrassing! Mrs. Kienlen left the school a few months later due to her sickness and she died in July 2003. The worst thing about it was that I never saw her again. I could never thank her for telling me that I was strong or how I got through my depression with her words echoing in my heart or that she was the one who showed me what strength really was.

After having two life-changing teachers, I figured my luck was going to run out. I was wrong again. When my family moved back to Virginia, I switched from a private school to a public school. In the private school, I struggled with my academics. I didn’t have a learning disability or anything, but it was really hard for me to learn. At the start of the 6^th grade, we all had to take a math placement test. I figured that I would be in the middle, maybe low class. I was put in the lowest math class. I knew I was bad at math, but this bad? Yeesh! There were only a handful of people in my class but I felt like the stupidest one in the room. It wasn’t until Mrs. Hutchings began her first lesson that I felt my anxiety fade. She didn’t treat me as a girl who just couldn’t make the cut for rigorous private school math, she treated me as just someone who needed a little more help with it. Mrs. Hutchings would spend more time with us individually than any other class. That one-on-one time helped me to understand math a little bit more. I did so well, that I actually got to move up a class! I’ve had many, many math classes since then, and even though I struggled, I never failed and I never gave up. And that’s all because of Mrs. Hutchings.

I made it through middle school and my first year of high school towards my next inspiring teacher: Mrs. Wynne. Mrs. Wynne taught my Pre-AP English class during my sophomore year, and let me tell you, I had a tough time. She had me reading books that I didn’t exactly like, but learned to respect. Okay, maybe I grew to like them a little later on… Mrs. Wynne wasn’t just an English teacher; she was also a Debate teacher! Being the debate obsessed girl that I was, I took in everything that she said. She gave me advice about using different tones of voice to accentuate certain points of my speech. She told me that the smallest body movements can make the biggest impact. She helped me rephrase things to show emotion. All of the tips and tricks she gave me helped me to become the captain of the high school’s debate team!

After having such an amazing teacher in my sophomore year, I was so looking forward to seeing if I would have another amazing teacher in my junior year, and I wasn’t disappointed. During my sophomore year, I had taken an information systems (computer) class, but I didn’t feel like I had learned enough to get me through real life so I decided to take it again. From the first moment I stepped into the room, I knew that I would have a really great teacher. Mrs. O’Hara was everything a high school student could ever want in a teacher. She was funny, creative, easy-going, and, most importantly, relatable. Mrs. O’Hara had a sixth sense when it came to her students. She could tell when someone was having either a really bad day or a really good day. Before her class one day, I had spent most of the day completely stressed out and upset over a problem that wasn’t my fault. I sat next to my friend in class and started to quietly tell her about my day. As if she has Spidey Senses, Mrs. O’Hara told me that I could go to her office and vent to my friend without any interruptions. How many teachers let you get up in the middle of class to work through a rough day? She didn’t give me a time limit, she didn’t tell me that my class assignment had to be turned in when everyone else did… She just let me have some space to escape from the mind-numbing pain I had felt all day. Not many teachers do that…

I had some pretty awesome teachers in my senior year of high school. I had Mrs. Goransson for my Advanced Composition class and Dr. Beach for AP Literature. From just the names of those classes, you can tell that I really like English classes. I love learning about the English language, reading books that I never would’ve known existed, and learning how to use punctuation properly (I still get stuck on semicolons!). Advanced Composition wasn’t just a class where I learned how to fine-tune my writing, but it was also a place that I could put my knowledge to good use. Our class also ran the Writing Center. If students needed help with a writing assignment, they could come to us and we would help them. While we students knew our stuff, teaching it was a whole other story! Mrs. Goransson taught us how to teach. She showed us how to guide a student into the right answer rather than tell them flat out. She taught us how to help people struggling with certain things such as SOLs or Capstone papers. That class even made me rethink my plans of becoming an event planner to a teacher. Who knows, maybe I will someday. While Mrs. Goransson helped me learn how to teach, Dr. Beach taught me what to teach. Even though I enjoyed English, it was always hard for me to understand the meanings behind the books we read in class, so I was a little terrified when I found out that we would be reading Crime and Punishment in class. But Dr. Beach did an amazing job at breaking the whole thing down for us. She took it all step by step, helping us to analyze the motifs and symbols, and actually made the book enjoyable by letting the class work together. Whenever I helped a student with a paper concerning a book, I would think about how Dr. Beach would have shown me, and it would make everything clearer.

In college, you don’t really get to make the kinds of relationships with your professors as you did before. The number of students they have to teach is doubled, the assignments and exams are much more complicated, and the office hours are very, very strict. You get a few different professors for 5 months and then a completely different set of professors for the next 5 months. So yeah, making relationships with professors is challenging. But there’s one professor who just threw that rule out of the window: Nancy Chamberlain. Nancy is a Recreation and Parks professor at the NOVA Annandale campus, and she is one of the most amazing people I have ever met. Why you ask? Let me put it this way- on the first day of class, she gave us candy. But it didn’t stop there! Nancy has this beautiful, infectious light that just radiates from her! She is positive, hard-working, and will do anything for her students. Fortunately, I had Nancy for two semesters rather than the typical one. She knew every one of her students by name and had relationships with each of them. She knew what we were going through, let us brag about our smallest accomplishments in class, and we could even hang out with her at her house. Yeah, she’s pretty cool. While those things are good and all, my favorite thing about Nancy was that she trusted us. I saw this eye-opening quote the other day about how college students can’t be expected to make life-making decisions immediately because just three months prior, we had to ask permission to go to the bathroom. Nancy trusted us enough to take on big projects, but she also understands that we need help. She wanted us to come to her with questions, but she also trusted our judgment. She knew that we could handle things on our own at the events, but she told us to find her if we had any trouble and she would gladly take the heat for us. Not only is Nancy a wonderful teacher, but she’s an amazing person with a big heart and an even bigger sense of humor.

Teachers aren’t given enough credit. They are the people who have to deal with children for 8 hours every day. They spend countless hours coming up with lesson plans, grading assignments, writing exam questions, not to mention they have lives outside of the classroom. They teach, they listen, they guide, they joke around, they motivate, and, most importantly, they inspire. Teachers are not paid nearly enough for all of the stuff they do and it’s a shame that a handful of “bad” teachers give the good ones a bad name. If I could, I’d give all of the wonderful, life-bettering teachers a million dollars every year for the rest of their life, but I can’t. So instead, I’ll just say thank you. Thank you for teaching me. Thank you for pushing me. Thank you for understanding me. Thank you for helping me. Thank you for believing in me. Thank you. Thank you.