I had just been hired to teach high school art.
I stood before my mentor, the artist who had been my guide and inspiration for 21 years.
When I was in junior high school, my mother had discovered that she lived just down the street from me. I took a class with her each week until I graduated. We had remained in touch.
“What’s the best piece of advice you can give me as a new high school art teacher?” I asked. “Tomorrow is our first day of school.” I needed her words of wisdom in preparation for my new position. We were in her home studio, a spacious room with windows overlooking white pines and gnarled apple trees.
Standing there in her loose-fitting cuffed blue jeans, navy canvas boat shoes with white socks, cream oxford shirt, and paint-stained muslin apron, this middle-aged woman looked right at me. Without a moment’s hesitation she gave me the best piece of teaching advice I would ever receive:
“Shake in your shoes before you open your mouth to speak. What you say could be remembered for a lifetime. Always be humbled by the power of teaching.”
A wave of fear ran through me. I had not expected this.
“Now I’m scared,” I said. I looked at her face framed by her short, straight light brown hair. Her clear, sharp blue eyes did not waver.
“Think about it,” she said. “Think about the teachers in your life who have said things to you that you still remember to this day, for better or for worse. You want your words to be remembered for the better.”
“That’s not the piece of advice I expected, but it’s good advice. Thank you,” I replied. “I hope I don’t mess up. I hope I’m as good an art teacher as you’ve been to me.”
I was preparing to go back to teach at the high school from which I had graduated. It was my chance to teach art to them all, the ones who loved art and the ones who thought it was a waste of time. The ones who thought art was recess, and the ones who took it for an ‘easy A.’ The ones who lived and breathed art, and the ones who had yet to discover its gifts. It was my chance to teach the quiet, hesitant kids-- like I had been—to help them find and celebrate something special within themselves. And it was my chance to teach mutual respect among young adults--each different, each trying to figure out their own life, each trying to understand how they ‘fit in.’ It was my chance to teach them all—through art, our universal language, ways to discover the amazing person inside themselves and each other, at a developmentally critical moment in their lives.
So I entered my high school art classroom on that first day, and as the students filtered in, what did I do?
I shook in my shoes.
I told them what my mentor had said to me. I told them that I had thought long and hard about what to say to them. And I wanted them to know that I would do my best to have my words be remembered for the better. For I would never know which of my words, if any, they would carry with them.
Now, nearly 40 years later from that day, every so often, a former student contacts me to tell me something I had told them one day long ago that made a difference. When I hear them recall encouraging words (most often things I have long forgotten), I am humbled by how long those words have lived in memory. I breathe a sigh of relief that I had been forewarned of the power of teaching, the power of words, the key to memorable teaching.
We are all teachers in one capacity or another--parents, grandparents, bosses, colleagues, friends, neighbors.
Who are the memorable teachers in your life? In what ways are you a memorable teacher?