Standing on their shoulders

God bless the teachers who taught and nurtured me ... I have never stopped learning from them

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Once upon a time, our Sunday School teacher passed around paper and pencils and asked our class to write the names of three people – other than a family member – who had influenced our lives.

A neighbor. A friend. A minister. A coach. 

We scribbled a few names and looked at our lists.

"I bet everybody has included at least one teacher," he said.

He was right, of course. It probably is written somewhere in the scriptures that teaching is the profession that begats all the other professions. 

An “Amazon influencer” popped up on my computer screen the other day, trying to get me to buy earbuds, polarized sunglasses and a peloton bike.  “Social media influencers ” are savvy marketers who push all the buttons on audience engagement and create trends to persuade followers to buy the products they promote.

Influencers? I’ve had them since I was 5 years old.

My teachers.

They built me much the same way a carpenter builds a house. They poured the foundation, framed the walls, plumb-bobbed the doors and windows and hammered a safe roof over my head.

Today is the beginning of Teacher Appreciation Week – a time to salute those who showed us how to diagram sentences and locate Portugal on a map.

And, in the eight years I have been a teacher, I have come to appreciate them even more.

I wish I could remember some of their names. They wander in and out of my formative thoughts every day – the wood shop teacher who lauded the virtues of Elmer’s Glue, and the driver’s ed teacher who advised us to never trust a blinker. 

Ever since I learned my colors in Mrs. Jesse Greene’s kindergarten class in LaGrange, I have never looked at the world in the same way. The first word I learned to spell – P-E-P-P-E-R – was written in chalk on the board the  first day in Mrs. John’s first-grade classroom. (It was the name of the dog in the Jimmy and Sue reader.) 

I was taught cursive writing in Mrs. Dorothy Marriotti’s second grade, and practiced my multiplication tables on the front row next to Mrs. Ann Lewis’s desk in the third grade. She told my parents she moved me there because I was squinting to see the blackboard. By the next summer, I was wearing glasses.

In the middle of my fourth grade year, I was uprooted from the backwater of LaGrange to a place known as Tidewater. It was a 10-year-old’s equivalent of culture shock, a non-stop launch from Mayberry to aristocratic Virginia. 

I was the new kid at school, a tiny stranger in a strange land. I was teased because my Southern accent followed me there, and I did not pronounce house as if rhymed with “loose” or “moose.’’

I struggled to keep pace academically. Many of my teachers recognized this and showed mercy. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. White, helped me navigate the challenges. Others, whose names and faces are blurred by memory, did their part. Especially when my father went to Vietnam as chief of surgery at DaNang and, as the oldest of five children, I had to step up and be the man of the house.

In the sixth grade, I was chosen as the correspondent for the school newspaper. I don't remember how it happened, but I wish I could go back in time and thank my teacher for seeing something in me I could not see in myself … and believing in me.

I was blessed with parents who recognized the responsibility of educating a child was not solely at the feet of the teacher. They fostered a love of learning and reading books. We moved to Jacksonville, Florida, at the start of my seventh-grade year, where my geography teacher was amazed I already knew the capitals of all 50 states. It was something my sister and I learned while counting license plates on a family vacation.

In the eighth grade at Ridgeview High in Atlanta, I learned not to daydream in boys health class. If we were caught not paying attention, Coach John Hosack would reach behind him, grab an eraser and throw it at the offender. (I can still see the chalk dust flying when he popped them in the forehead.) The coach also informed my p.e. class we had to do 650 sit-ups in one sitting to get an “A.’’  It seemed an impossible feat – even more impossible when I think about it now – but we kept raising the bar in increments of 25 sit-ups every day. On the final day of class, I did it. My stomach was sore for a week, but I did it.

My band teacher, Mr. Daniel Smith held high expectations for his students. He worked us harder than any coach I  ever had. He was proud, but not satisfied, when our symphonic band achieved a superior rating at band festival.. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to be No. 1,’’ he would tell us. “It’s the hardest thing in the world to stay No. 1.’’ He played the bassoon. Years later, it was found beside him when he was shot to death in the woods. It’s a sadness I carry with me to this day. 

 My 10th-grade English teacher, Mrs. Janet Atwood, changed my life.. When our new school, Riverwood, was organizing its first newspaper, the Raiders Digest, she signed me up for journalism. I did not know it until I heard my name over the intercom during the morning announcements. I was named sports editor. Two years later, I won first place in sports writing in the Georgia Scholastic Press Association.

She encouraged me to pursue newspaper writing as my calling. One of my regrets is that she did not live to see me have a long and successful career in journalism. I worked for The Macon Telegraph newspaper for almost 37 years, and I became a teacher myself eight years ago, teaching high school journalism at Stratford Academy in Macon.

Dr. Wally Eberhard was my college adviser and my favorite professor at the University of Georgia’s Henry W. Grady School of Journalism and Mass Communications. He was old school, an uncompromising fundamentalist when it came to facts and fairness. There was no indoctrination in his curriculum, no blurry lines or partisanship printed anywhere in his textbook. Objectivity and ethics were his tenets. He hammered them home with zero tolerance. 

Until his death a few years ago, he followed my post-graduate work in the School of Life, too. I often would see him at homecoming or drop by for a visit whenever I was at the Grady. We met for coffee. He sent supportive letters and emails. He wanted to know about my family, my job, my books. He never stopped giving me homework, either, assigning me to give him updates when time permitted. It was daily journalism.

I was not the only former student whose busy life he kept up with and continued to encourage. Although he was a humble guy, he took pride in each of their successes, much the same way an artist reflects on a painting in a gallery.

He never stopped teaching. That’s what teachers do.