Thanking a teacher can go a long way

Published 8:57 am Monday, January 3, 2011

He is now fifty-five and heads a school of music in New York. In professional contact with our university musicologist daughter, he inquired, “Are you the daughter of Dr. Wallace Alcorn?” He then named the college class he took with me 37 years ago when he was 18 and reported he is still using my material in teaching his students.

An effective teacher has to keep doing the right thing despite students not recognizing it as the right thing. I don’t think a teacher has any logical basis on which to reach final conclusions about the success of his or her teaching, because they never get the feedback they deserve.

Then this man wrote to me dierectly:

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I want you to know that your regimented and systematic approach, and your insistence that I toe the line without excuse, were used by God greatly in my life. Thank you!

I haven’t kept all my lesson plans and teaching notes, but I have treasured the biographical forms I had required students to return so I could get to know them individually. I sent him a PDF of what he had submitted. When I had earlier sent such to another student, now a best-selling novelist, he replied: “That’s scary!”

When I prepared now to send this man his form, I noticed he had indicated a home address at a children’s home in North Carolina. I had then presumed his parents were on the staff. Now I learn he was a resident, an inmate if you will, after his father had abandoned the family and his mother became a prostitute. Now he tells me his life story and I recognize how needy he was when he came to us in Chicago.

He rightly remembers my classes as demanding, but I gather he now recognizes I was more demanding of myself in order to teach him well. It was for his benefit. When a graduate school dean inquired of my undergraduate students, the common evaluation was: “He’s hard, but fair; and you learn a lot.” I was satisfied with this, and so was the dean who then hired me.

When in “retirement” and teaching in a community college, a colleague retired. Quite despondently he told me, “I don’t know if I ever accomplished a thing in all these years.” I laid into him and laid it on him.

You have to keep teaching as well as you can, despite what the students think at the time. Perhaps — but only perhaps — you’ll hear from a few sometime before you die that they’ve since learned better. For every former student who is thoughtful and responsible enough to say so, there are innumerable others who never get around to say thank-you once our teaching has finally taken its effect.

I asked how many of his own teachers and professors he had contacted and thanked for what they taught him. He hadn’t thought of any of the several he now especially appreciates. I challenged him to contact his former teachers and tell them how much he gained from them. Each time he does so, he should tell himself there is at least one of his own former students who feels he same way about his teaching — even if this one never says gets around to it. If there are teachers he appreciates, there are students who appreciate him.

Teachers may need to take this much on faith, but there is something you can do. You can contact your former teachers and thank them. The most important teachers to contact are probably those you most hated at the time.

Others of my former students have contacted me, and I treasure their affirmations as precious. I am in weekly contact with several.

Not many of my former teachers are still alive, and I have missed too many opportunities. I do have lunch every few months with one of them, now ninety-four and long ago retired. Yet, just now I thought of a man who, as a young graduate assistant, taught me Greek exegesis, and I will get a letter off to him now.