Choose Your Teachers Well

They make you better at learning and teaching too

Although this Substack began as a sequential memoir covering my life from 1992-1997, it has evolved into something more like memoir-in-essay. A series of essays on rather personal topics - or at least personal growth topics. The past couple of weeks I was firmly in the present in my writing, memories only days or weeks old. In this weekʻs essay I dip back six decades. I am in a period of rapid learning in my life, which has me thinking about the importance of teachers.

Last week I wrote a long essay about having external observers to give us feedback, and developing an internal observer to guide us when the external world and the opinions of others become confusing or are just unavailable. But I had really intended to write about my third grade teacher, Mrs Thompson. I feel grateful to her on the regular. She gave me two immeasurable gifts. She set the foundation for me to become the learner I am today. And on the flip side of the coin, she awakened in me a passion for teaching.

She did that for a 9-year-old. Sixty years ago. And I still bless her for those gifts.

Letʻs set the scene. Although for simplicity I say I grew up in Colorado, the trajectory was not that simple. We moved to Colorado when I was four. Then when I was in first grade we uprooted to Miami. So sad I felt like I had a pretzel stuck in my throat for weeks, I quickly discovered the upside. We wore floaties to swim in our backyard pool after school in the winter and I succeeded at growing watermelons from a seed despite the skepticism of my parents. Then less than a year into Miami life, my parents accepted jobs for the following academic year in Canada. I was forbidden to tell anyone at school so I wrote T-O-R-O-N-T-O in pencil on the wooden desk, chanting the magical letters silently before erasing them with spit on my thumb.

My siblings and I went from TV ads teaching us to say “Si mama, con Gleem!” when asked whether we had brushed our teeth…to cereal boxes and soup cans listing contents in French. Backyard mangoes forgotten, I was walking to and from school on sidewalks that became snow tunnels as winter dragged on. Luckily, kids are learning machines, and mainly I learned how to observe with an open mind in new environments, show up with confidence, navigate change, and blend with others to make friends quickly.

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On the back is written, in my grandmother Annaʻs handwriting “October 1964. Canada. Don Mills Ont.” From left: little brother, Grams, me, little sister.

Something that has always puzzled me is why children who make mischief because they are bored in class, or kids who have difficulty learning in school, are made wrong, given negative labels, even punished. Like I said, little ones are born learning machines. Thatʻs how we end up crawling and climbing trees, singing jingles and telling dad jokes. Miraculous really. Every kid is a genius. Isnʻt it up to the adults to figure out what they are doing wrong if their children arenʻt learning in a classroom?

Paying tribute to his teacher, natural horsemanship clinician Pat Parelli used to tell students that Tom Dorranceʻs last words to him, his single most important piece of advice, were “Never knock the curiosity out of a young horse.” I wish every single parent and caregiver and teacher knew to never knock the curiosity out of a young human. Luckily, my parents understood this principle when their precocious first born turned out to have been “vaccinated with a phonograph needle.”¹ They often repeated the story of how I demanded to be allowed to go to preschool, and they explained to me that I could not go because I was not reliably potty-trained. So the next day I was. Delighted at first to be at school, apparently I soon started crying when it was time to leave in the morning. Puzzled, my parents took me to a child psychologist.²

He declared me bored. So my parents enrolled me in a highly enriched preschool, where I happily learned to say grace in French, and by the time I got to kindergarten was reading the instructions that accompanied the exercises for teaching a child to read. I tolerated first and second grade, probably because the social demands of two moves in two years provided plenty of extracurricular learning. And there were books³. But classes were still less than exciting.

Somehow the public school system in Don Mills, Ontario, picked a cohort of bored kids to be challenged by completing third, fourth and fifth grades in two years rather than three. Enter Mrs Thompson.

Mrs Thompson realized I had a passion and mind for science (see footnote below, hello A Wrinkle in Time). She bought an incubator and chicken eggs, and had me stay after school each afternoon to care for them, researching and documenting the mysterious, miraculous process of growth and eventual hatching to present to my classmates. She fed my imagination and curiosity and hunger for learning.

Thatʻs how Mrs Thompson taught me how to choose a teacher. I look for a teacher who knows their subject matter, but more importantly knows how to teach. A teacher who sets their students up for success, and also allows them to fail and pick themselves up, knowing that you donʻt know what you donʻt know, and you never invent or create without making mistakes and messes. A teacher who is willing to go out on a limb with their student. A teacher who gives good hugs. A teacher less interested in showing how smart and accomplished they are than in making their students feel smart and capable and valued.

Mrs Thompson also caught me skipping ahead in our softcover math workbooks. Instead of reprimanding me and insisting I pay attention in class, she told me to go ahead and work at my own pace. In a matter of months, I finished the fifth grade workbooks. Rather than let me go on to the sixth grade material, she had me spend the remainder of the year teaching my classmates. Of course, as the eldest of three I already had the experience of being a good big sister⁴, mentoring and teaching my younger siblings. Mrs Thompson taught me that there is joy in sharing what we know, joy in seeing others succeed.

Sixty years later, I have started saying that I wish there were a computer cable I could plug into my brain and download everything in there to younger people. Lacking that, I spend a pretty high percentage of my time mentoring, coaching, explaining, writing on Substack or on my real estate blog.⁵

And thanks to my parents, to my maternal grandmother, to Mrs Thompson, to all my early and present teachers, I still have a voracious curiosity, and surround myself with people who are always inquiring, always learning.

We need great teachers right now. We all need to be curious and open minded as learners, as consumers of information. We need to challenge ourselves and each other to choose our teachers and our sources of information wisely.

Some of you might remember this song, Teach Your Children. From 1970. The lyrics keep running through my head. Thank you Graham Nash. Please listen. And then if you are interested in the back story, see the footnote here.⁶

1. Clearly showing my age here.

2. My father was in a Ph.D. program in clinical psychology at the time. This was in Pittsburgh, the same soil out of which Mr Rogers Neighborhood blossomed.

3. A Wrinkle in Time, one of my two childhood favorites as described in this essay, was published in 1962.

4. My younger siblings disagree with that assessment. I am pretty sure they do anyway.

5. The real estate blog can be found here on the Hawaiʻi Life website.

6. “I realized right there that we had better start teaching our children better; otherwise, civilization was in jeopardy. That was it.” From this GuitarPlayer interview.