When you finish reading this paragraph, I hope you will close your eyes and think about the teachers who made you a better person or helped shape the future direction of your life. Picture in your mind’s eye your old classrooms and what happened there. What did those teachers do to make you feel smart, special, safe, or valued? Did they believe in you when you were doubting yourself? Or refuse to let you do substandard work?
I did this exercise when writing an earlier draft of this essay, and I promise you it’s a rewarding experience.
Please do it now.
OK, now I have a question: Have you thanked those teachers, either in person, in a letter, or on the telephone? I ask because thanking your special teachers personally will mean more to them than you can begin to imagine. It will lift their spirits, rejuvenate them, and give them a renewed sense that what they spent their lives doing did matter.
If it’s too late to make a personal connection because they have shuffled off this mortal coil, then you might consider writing an appreciation and sharing it with friends and family members. Submit it to your local newspaper, or post it on Facebook or a blog. Just get the word out there, because that will inspire others to express their own gratitude.
I want to share a story about a former student who called me, out of the blue, a few months ago. His call could not have come at a better time, because 2025 has not been a particularly good year for me: Brain cancer killed my youngest brother this Spring, a handful of family members whom I dearly love are struggling with significant health issues, Joan and I have lost some good friends to death and dementia, and our country seems to be sinking deeper and deeper in crude bigotry and crypto-fascism.
One day this June I was riding my bike in a hilly part of western Massachusetts when my phone rang. I normally don’t answer the phone when I’m biking, and I’m pretty sure that I would have ignored the call if I had been coasting down a hill. However, I was approaching a very steep hill that I dreaded climbing, and so I jumped at the chance to take a break.
Hello, I said, tentatively. “Is this John Merrow,” a man asked? Who’s calling, I asked suspiciously. “My name is Paul (redacted). Mr. Merrow was my high school English teacher 60 years ago, and I’m trying to reach him, so I can say ‘Thank you.’”
After I admitted to being John Merrow, we talked for about 15 minutes. He told me that I had set him on a track to become an avid reader. How, I asked?
“One time your assignment was to analyze some poetry,” Paul told me, “And, because I was kind of a wise-ass, I wrote a careful analysis of the lyrics of a popular folk song, Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” I expected you to get angry because I hadn’t done the assignment, but you went out of your way to praise me. I think you even read it aloud to the class.”
And Paul, until then a self-described indifferent student, became a voracious reader. He told me that during his four years of college he read the complete works of Dosevesky, Hesse, Steinbeck, Salinger, Orwell, Tolstoy and Nietzsche.
“Want to know how I ended up in your class,” he asked?
Before I share that story, you need to know about the high school where I taught for two years, 1964-65 and 1965-66. Like most large high schools back then, Schreiber High in Port Washington, NY, was rigidly tracked, levels One through Five. As an untrained rookie teacher, I wasn’t allowed anywhere near the One and Two level students, who were, in truth, the students the people in power cared most about. Their parents were probably professionals with multiple degrees, and so these privileged kids were on track to attend prestigious colleges.
Most of the Threes had a shot at college, while the Fours were headed straight to work or the military, and the small number of Fives, many with severe handicapping conditions, were basically being warehoused.
At Schreiber, I taught five classes–125 students –of 10th, 11th, or 12th grade English, mostly Threes and maybe one or two classes of Fours.
By the way, I cannot imagine a better gig than teaching Threes and Fours. Those young people, who felt the opposite of entitled, responded eagerly to any and all positive attention, including challenges.
Teaching Threes and Fours had other benefits: As long as my kids read a couple of Shakespeare’s plays and weren’t disruptive, administrators paid no attention to what we did in my classroom. It wasn’t that they trusted me; they really didn’t care.
**That meant we could put MacBeth and Lady MacBeth on trial for first degree murder, with students (in every role) ‘testifying under oath.’ And so we did that.
**That meant I could invite the kids to set the poems we were reading to music, which they did. I still remember a trio/quartet performing Edna St Vincent Millay’s “Renascence.”
**That meant I could encourage my students to “elevate the quality of the bathroom graffiti” by erasing the scatological slurs and replacing them with lines from TS Eliot, John Donne, Robert Frost, and others–and we did that too.
**That meant I could create a stand-alone unit of anti-war poetry–during the growing VietNam war protest movement–to introduce my students to Wilfred Owen, Stephen Spender, Rupert Brooke, and Siegfried Sassoon.
**That meant I could challenge my kids to write and stage their own play, which they did. You can read about it here.
Back to Paul’s story: Apparently he was a Four when he got called into the Guidance Councillor’s office. “My father came with me, and when the Councillor said that I should either drop down to level Five or transfer to trade school and become an electrician or a plumber, my Dad erupted. ‘Bullshit!,’ he shouted, as he slammed his fist on her desk. ‘My son is going to college! I want him in college level classes!’
“And that’s how I ended up in your class,” he concluded.
He told me that he graduated from college with 3 majors: History, Political Science, and Sociology. “I’m pretty sure I was the only student carrying three majors.” After college Paul worked for Xerox for a few years before starting his own financial advising company.
Paul’s story about his Dad proves another point: Thanking our teachers is necessary but not sufficient. For more on parents, please read Billy Collins’ superb poem, “The Lanyard.”
Have you thanked other teachers, I wanted to know? “Yes, my sixth grade teacher,” he replied. “I called him years ago and thanked him. This was about a year before he passed away.”
The list of teachers who changed my life for the better includes Catherine Peterson, the First Grade teacher who taught me and most of my siblings to read–and to love reading; two high school English teachers, William Sullivan and Roland McKinley; a writing teacher at Dartmouth, Alexander Laing; an English professor at Indiana University, Donald Gray; and David K. Cohen, my doctoral thesis advisor at Harvard. I thanked the first and last in person and another, Professor Gray, by letter, but I never had the opportunity to tell the others how much they meant to me.
By the way, Saying “Thank You” feels really good. It’s satisfying to close a door left open from your past. Try it!
I don’t think I will ever forget how being thanked by a former student made me feel. My spirits were lifted, and my troubles disappeared. Of course, Paul’s phone call couldn’t bring back my brother Jim or help my ailing family members recover, but hearing from Paul—60+ years after I taught him—made me feel that I had made a difference. There’s no better feeling.
Teaching has always been–often literally–a thankless job, but it doesn’t have to, and shouldn’t, be that way. So, please, express your gratitude.
The Merrow Report 