Teachers inspire me. They always have. I think that’s a big part of what they’re supposed to do.

I was a poor kid, a hungry kid, hungry for all the things poverty, abuse, and a broken home denied me – food, yes, but also knowledge, dignity, freedom from shame, understanding, hope, a world that made sense.

I never went to any sort of preschool. I didn’t go to Kindergarten. It wasn’t required back then. And I missed a lot of first grade playing hooky with my older brother and his friends. We moved a lot, so it was hard for the schools to keep tabs on us.

My second grade teacher changed things for me. She literally inspired me to come to school by using food as a reward for doing well. Candy bars were very motivational for a hungry 7-year-old. And she inspired my imagination with letters from her brother, the professional football coach, in which he talked of a world where hard work led to success. And she inspired me with books where people did the right thing because it was the right thing to do. From all of that I stopped playing hooky and began believing in the possibility of things being better.

In high school Ms. Carolyn Thomas, the only teacher to ever give me an F on an assignment, inspired me to try harder. She, after all, was a partially paralyzed polio survivor who let no setback stop her. And she often made me stay in her classroom during lunch to look at information on colleges, fill out applications, and study for standardized tests. Before her, I never even imagined the possibility of going to college. She acted as if it were a foregone conclusion, and after a while I began to believe it too.

Another high school teacher, Ms. Catherine Rotter, posted my poetry on her walls and named me editor of the school literary journal and told me something I’ve believed in ever since: Do what you want to do; there are ways to get by.

And in college, Dr. Ann Carver, teaching Shakespeare of all things, showed me I wasn’t alone in the ways I saw the world, that there were centuries of conversation about life, meaning, possibilities worth joining, that the world of ideas was inexhaustible.

Teachers inspired me. Perhaps, not surprisingly, I became a teacher. Now, teaching inspires me, as it has every year of the more than 40 years I’ve been doing it. As the poem below suggests, I’m inspired by my students’ efforts, by their stubborn insistence on the validity of their ideas and perspectives, by their attempts, their successes, their belief in what they can achieve, and more than anything, by their growth.

At 62 I rise at 4

to read my students’ writing.

In the kitchen by the light of the refrigerator

I pour cold coffee into a glass, then cream.

Walking quietly to the bathroom I step over

the motionless puddle of dog spread out

across the hallway, then back to the chair

and the light of the computer screen.

Five weeks in, they begin to find their eyes,

their voices, their styles, the subject matter they really want

to explore. Each new page I look at makes me laugh,

think, visualize, sometimes, even now,

forty years after I started teaching, cry.

There is little more gratifying than mornings like this.

And here is a poem about a lesson in perspective prompted by a recent student. The inspiring part of that story is that the student didn’t take offense; didn’t shut down, storm off, curtail her own opportunity to learn, but rather, listened, thought about it, reflected on her own perceptions, came back every day for the rest of the semester, and grew in her understanding of others. That’s the sort of classroom experience that continues to inspire me.

Why Careful Correction Can Be Important

A student writes a poem called Nostalgia

longing for the good old days

when things were simpler and better.

I empathize with the anxiety

that life today can cause,

its pace and complexity.

But I point out that the good old days

were only good for a handful of people,

mostly men, mostly white men,

mostly white men with money.

I remind her that in the good old days

people died 20 years younger,

that 5 times more children

died before they turned 5,

that polio, measles, and rubella

were real things, and various forms

of repression meant many people

lived miserable lives out of fear

of just being who they felt they were.

I remind her of ancient Greece,

The Golden Age, which was only golden

for a little more than 10% of the population.

For the rest, rights were non-existent,

but poverty, slavery, servitude were.

Later, walking through my coffee shop,

I overhear a man talking about the good old days.

His colleague asks if those were the days

when advertisers showed pictures

of pregnant women with a cigarette

in one hand, a Budweiser in the other.