About a dozen years ago, I found a note on our garbage can as I was getting ready to roll it up our driveway. It was written on the corner of an envelope I discarded. I took it off, read it, and then went looking for a frame. The framed note sat on a shelf in my home office until we moved last November. It’s going back up in our new digs once we get fully settled. The note reads as follows:
Hello, Mr. Tebo!
Brandon and Joe Bell here!
We’re now your garbage men here.
Just wanted to say “Hi!”
Brandon and Joe were students in the Addison system. I was their elementary school principal. They were a year or two apart and fell somewhere in the middle of my tenure there. I remembered the two brothers as being good stand up kids. They may have had one or two opportunities to meet me in a more formal setting during trips to my office. Most such stops were made because of errors in judgement while out on the playground. Our chats were merely reviews of the “rules of the road”. A quick reminder of the “do’s” and the “don’ts”. I held literally thousands of such conversations over my fifteen year tenure there.
I liked their note because they took the time to let me know they remembered me. They could have just as easily ignored me and simply picked up my trash. But they didn’t. They reached out, and I appreciated their contact. Over the next year we waved at each other as they made their rounds, but we seldom spoke. Eventually, they moved on to other things.
When you’re an educator, you really never know what impact you’ve had on others. In my seventy-three years I recall running into only two of my teachers out in the real world. The first was my first year in Addison. I attended the conference for elementary school principals and ran into my sixth grade teacher, Mr. Cromar. I was a first year newbie, and he was nearing the end of his career. He recognized me as “Robbie” and I cherished the moment. I expect he did too.
Ruth and I were in a restaurant in Myrtle Beach twenty years ago when I recognized one of my former math teachers, Mr. Sing. I approached him and his wife, also a teacher at Dondero, and introduced myself. He recognized my name and thanked me for the contact. I could tell he liked being remembered.
On another trip to Myrtle Beach an attractive woman several years my junior walked up to me and Ruth while we were having dinner and asked, “Are you Mr. Tebo?” I replied in the affirmative, and she said, “You were my favorite teacher. I enjoyed being in your class. I could tell you cared about us.” She called her two daughters over and introduced them. That’s another moment that’s locked in my memory.
All the kids I worked with over the years are adults now. My first year students have started to collect social security. That’s an indication that time is moving on. I’ve had students become doctors, lawyers, homemakers, enter the military, delivery men and women, plumbers, electricians, architects, computer programmers, restaurateurs, teachers, social workers, school principals and superintendents, carpenters, entrepreneurs, bankers, business executives, real-estate tycoons, and at least one became a movie star. They were all chance encounters set up by school district boundaries and, later, school of choice initiatives. We didn’t seek each other out, but we changed each others lives.
When former students take the time, like Brandon and Joe, to reach out and say hello, I appreciate it, and I want to say “Thank you!”
To your point; a couple of years after I left teaching a young woman came up to me and said, “You’re Mr. Russell, aren’t you?” I said, “Yes I am.” Then she said, “You were the best teacher I ever had.” I was both flattered and ashamed. I enjoyed the comment, but I did not remember her name. You never know the impression you’re making on your students.