Today I went into the cafeteria at school to buy a couple of cartons of skim milk. As I passed a table of third graders, a woman reached out and stopped me.

“Are you Mrs. Johnston?” she asked. I stopped and saw that a student I know well, M, was sitting next to the woman. I knew it was M’s birthday, and obviously her mom had come to the school to celebrate by having lunch with her.

M is not in any of my reading groups and so I know her only because I have worked with her teacher the past couple months. It’s her teacher’s first year of teaching, and I go to the classroom twice a week to do reading workshop with her students. I’ve gotten to know all the kids in the class - and M has been particularly eager to participate in class discussions.

When I affirmed that I was indeed Mrs. Johnston, M’s mother went on to tell me about how M loves me so much and about how she had been wanting her mom to meet me for ages. She said that we had obviously been just barely missing each other. She’d come into her daughter’s classroom, and M would say, “Did you see her? She just left.” She would be sure that we had passed in the hallway.

Then M’s mother told me something that I will cherish my entire life. She said, “I never liked to read, and I’ve tried so hard not to pass that feeling along to M. She just loves having you come into her classroom and teach lessons. She’s excited about reading. One day I asked her why she loves you so much, and she told me, ‘Mrs. Johnston INSPIRES me.’”

I am writing this, not to brag because I’m sure that for every student I inspire, there are many more that I don’t inspire. However, someday when I’m too old and feeble to remember stories like this, I can look back and read this and know that my efforts as a teacher really did make a difference for some children. What more can a person ask for than to “inspire” children to read.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Teaching/Education, That's My Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.