Thank You For My Children
I deeply regret that it took me this long to finally read Rick Pepe's charming sort-of-memoir of his final year of teaching at Schalmont High School, Thank You For My Children (the title taken from Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird). Rick, my brother Jay, Tom Quigley and the late Walt Scott were inseparable companions in high school at SMI and Bishop Scully, and as the tag-along younger brother I often experienced the pleasure of their company as well.
Each chapter covers a month of his 38th and final year, together with a look back at a sample of the same month in years gone by, and a lesson or two learned to pass along to new teachers following his path.
It is no surprise that Rick became an extraordinary teacher. It is also no surprise that this passage had me wiping my eyes:
When you love your job and give some thought to why you came to love it or how it happened that you chose it to begin with, often names and faces of those who served as your role models will swim into focus.
… Mrs. Laura Going taught me English in ninth and tenth grades, and made it enjoyable. It's safe to say hers was my favorite class throughout all of high school. I couldn't have known then that I'd spend thirty-seven years teaching English 9 and 10 in various combinations. All I knew was that at a time when teaching was beginning to loom large as a career possibility, said enjoyment likely tipped the scales in favor of high school English. Today that enjoyment lingers in memory, though most of the lesson content has fled.
Whatever else I may have forgotten, I still smile to think of the chance she gave the “Big Four” - Walt, Jay, Tom and I - to star in a classroom production as four of Shakespeare's most memorable: Brutus, Caesar, Antony and Cassius, to our delight and the probable indifference of the rest of the class. I suppose she could tell how much I enjoyed that, just as I suppose she had heard much later that I'd become an English teacher, too. Mrs. G likely never knew that her example, as much as my aptitude for language or anything else, was the reason I'd followed in her footsteps. Now, as I knelt before her casket, it gnawed at me that I'd never taken the time to make the effort to tell her that, though I'd been teaching for twenty-three years at the time of her passing.
Mom took delight in the success of all her students, no question about it, and some, like Rick, were particularly special to her. It seems incredible to me, looking back, that she only taught high school English for about five and a half years. Her influence in that short time affected a generation.
And now, thanks to Rick, I've come to realize that her remarkable talents continue to ripple more than half a century later, not only among her own students, but among the students of her students, and so on and so on, long after she left us in 1995.
Your point is well-taken, Rick.
But fear not. She knew.
And she was so proud.
Each chapter covers a month of his 38th and final year, together with a look back at a sample of the same month in years gone by, and a lesson or two learned to pass along to new teachers following his path.
It is no surprise that Rick became an extraordinary teacher. It is also no surprise that this passage had me wiping my eyes:
When you love your job and give some thought to why you came to love it or how it happened that you chose it to begin with, often names and faces of those who served as your role models will swim into focus.
… Mrs. Laura Going taught me English in ninth and tenth grades, and made it enjoyable. It's safe to say hers was my favorite class throughout all of high school. I couldn't have known then that I'd spend thirty-seven years teaching English 9 and 10 in various combinations. All I knew was that at a time when teaching was beginning to loom large as a career possibility, said enjoyment likely tipped the scales in favor of high school English. Today that enjoyment lingers in memory, though most of the lesson content has fled.
Whatever else I may have forgotten, I still smile to think of the chance she gave the “Big Four” - Walt, Jay, Tom and I - to star in a classroom production as four of Shakespeare's most memorable: Brutus, Caesar, Antony and Cassius, to our delight and the probable indifference of the rest of the class. I suppose she could tell how much I enjoyed that, just as I suppose she had heard much later that I'd become an English teacher, too. Mrs. G likely never knew that her example, as much as my aptitude for language or anything else, was the reason I'd followed in her footsteps. Now, as I knelt before her casket, it gnawed at me that I'd never taken the time to make the effort to tell her that, though I'd been teaching for twenty-three years at the time of her passing.
Mom took delight in the success of all her students, no question about it, and some, like Rick, were particularly special to her. It seems incredible to me, looking back, that she only taught high school English for about five and a half years. Her influence in that short time affected a generation.
And now, thanks to Rick, I've come to realize that her remarkable talents continue to ripple more than half a century later, not only among her own students, but among the students of her students, and so on and so on, long after she left us in 1995.
Your point is well-taken, Rick.
But fear not. She knew.
And she was so proud.