Massive fan of this thread. Thank you Guy Craig and Brock Eldon for getting this rolling.

My junior and senior English teachers were top three all-time for my 50+ teachers K-12 and huge positive influences in me believing I could be a writer.

(also long note)

Junior year, Mrs. Sullivan was Catholic (she went to my church), was from Massachusetts, and she had this classy Boston accent. “Mistah Seah,” she would say, whenever I’d get rowdy. I had just moved up to CT from AL and whenever we read aloud, Shakespeare or whatever, the kids would snicker at my delivery— which was more idiotic than iambic pentameter— and she’d stick up for me in a way that kept the laughs dull. She knew what it was like to have an accent. And I didn’t mind. I was hamming it up a bit, new kid and all. I think she knew that too. We read a lot of short stories, not always aloud, and everything about the way she taught was like booster shots in the arm for reading and writing again after a crippling year with my sophomore English teacher (who I wrote about a bit in one of my posts). Claire Sullivan was a blessing and pure class.

Senior year, Dr Kersti Linask was well read and educated, she went to Vassar, her daughter did too iirc. It was the strangest thing, and I still smile about this today, Dr Linask never seemed to care much for boys or men. I hope someday she’ll read my book.

She was a proud Estonian with vocal disdain for anything that reminded her of the old Soviet republic. In retrospect, I wonder if some traditional American elements of masculinity got mixed in with that which disgusted her. She had little patience for our antics in class, rehashing knucklehead things we did over the weekend, mailbox baseball, drinking and/or hitting on girls. Yet somehow, some way, she put up with me. I kept in touch with her for years after graduating until she retired and moved back to Estonia.

Her class discussions were so good. She let the students go at it, so long at it was civil. She was a master moderator. She was legit encouraging of pure whey protein bros who genuinely tried to use their head between the ears and participated respectfully in class. She had this command that made learning feel like it was something each of us deserved, regardless of interests or backgrounds. She’d let good discussions go on after the bell, about Siddhartha, Beowulf or whatever we were on about, and then she’d write us a hall pass and we’d pick them back up the next day. She gave us a ton of latitude on books we could choose to read and write essays about. I read Zora’s Eyes one month (when she pressed us to read an author who didn’t look like us) and then she let me read Capote’s In Cold Blood and Milton’s Paradise Lost. She’d prob be fired now but it was great for me at the time.

My favorite memory of Dr Linask was toward the end of the year, after our yearbooks came out. She was handing out papers while we were all trading yearbooks and writing notes and such. When she handed me mine she quietly mentioned my senior quote was the best she’d ever read. It wasn’t anything I spent any time on but I think about it almost every day now.

“I want to live, not just go through life.”

It was a rare, first pass, broke watch is right twice a day kinda line that I didn’t look back on and cringe. Doubt I would have remembered it had she not paid me the compliment she did.

Great teachers have a way of seeing us through all the crap of our youth and bringing out the good even when we don’t see it ourselves.