How appropriate it is that here on the cusp of National Teacher Appreciation Week, I receive a message from one of my mother’s third-grade students from 1967. He writes to say she was his favorite teacher from his elementary school years. He includes a class photo which shows him standing close to her. He’s wearing a scout uniform, and he gives the camera a confident look. She’s the mother I remember with her kind eyes and a slight closed-lip grin. She’s fifty-seven years old in this photo, only two years from her retirement. I remember her remarking how much she missed teaching in the fall when she saw schoolgirls walking past her house, books cradled in their arms. I always imagined she was a very good teacher because she was kind and patient, but it’s good to have my suspicion confirmed by her former student.

My mother started teaching when she was eighteen. At the time, she didn’t need a degree; she only needed to pass a licensing exam. By the time she retired she’d taught forty-one years. I remember the gifts her students gave her at Christmas time: the earrings, the necklaces, the handkerchiefs. I remember her sitting at our kitchen table at night, marking students’ assignments and exams. Often, I’d sit with her, working on my own lessons. I loved the blush of her red marking pencil and the answer key she used to grade multiple-choice exams. Just prior to the start of a new school year—that time of preparation—I’d be with her in her classroom where she’d be working on bulletin board displays and making sure she had textbooks ready for her students.

A quiet school on a warm, late summer day always seemed almost holy to me. The smell of fresh floor wax, a door closing quietly at the end of a long hallway, the desks in their neat rows. It was suitable for my mother, and it would become suitable for me as well. Here I am, having taught for over forty years, all because I inherited my mother’s love of books, and I wanted to share what I knew with other people.

My mother loved children. I took whatever skills I have as a teacher to the university level. When I step into a classroom, I think of my mother who taught me to care about people, to respect them, to show interest in them, and to treat them as individuals. At her funeral in 1988, several of her former students appeared, and they all told me how much they loved her. These days, whenever I’m back in southeastern Illinois to do an event for a new book, one or two of her former students are there to tell me the same.

And now this message from her student from 1967, telling me my mother had an impact on him. I love knowing that whatever she did in her time with him in the classroom mattered. What more could any teacher want to hear? So often, teachers labor in obscurity. I’m sure my mother wasn’t a dynamic teacher. She wasn’t particularly flashy or memorable with her methods of instruction. Her gift was her compassion, her gentle nature, her kindness, and I’m so glad to know that this one student, among others, remembers that.