Holly Holbert - Thank You, Teacher: Grateful Students Tell the Stories of the Teachers Who Changed Their Lives

Copyright 2016 by Holly and Bruce Holbert

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Page 273 is an extension of this copyright page. Parts of this book were previously published by Kaplan Publishing in a different form in 2010 under the title Signed, Your Student.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

First printing, May 2016

ISBN 978-1-60868-418-2

EISBN 978-1-60868-419-9

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to our parents,

Vince and Margaret Moore,

Bonnie Hogue, and

Pat and Barb Holbert;

and our children,

Natalie, Luke, and Jackson Holbert.

THIS BOOK WAS BORN in a fashion akin to the birth of my first child. The first labor pains arrived in early morning, and I was the last to know.

On a December night several years ago, Holly woke me, saying she couldnt sleep. I remember checking the clock to see if I had slept through the alarm. It was sometime after 2:00 AM, and sleep was at a premium.

She announced she had decided to write a book for the teachers, the ones like you no one hears about.

What? I asked.

I was thinking about how you stand out in the hallway between classes to make sure you talk to everybody when they pass by or come into your room. You make jokes with them and their girlfriends or boyfriends. Kids you dont even have in class stop to talk with you. Sometimes you make people feel better, and you dont even know them. I want to see if I can find stories about those teachers.

Im sure I was not terribly encouraging. I may have yawned and thought: This too shall pass.

When I next woke, though, Holly was already at the computer, and since that morning Im not sure she has spent a stretch of more than twenty-four hours away from it. She started out with a query letter to prospective contributors filled with such regard for me and written in such sincere language that even if the project had not progressed any further, the letter itself would have been a gift as generous as any Ive been given. It seemed to me, though, that the letters moving qualities spelled out the projects doom. No one would respond to a query that didnt include who would possess the international rights and where each contributors name might appear on the jacket.

I was wrong.

Stories began arriving a week later. Janet Reno called, and I didnt take the call because the caller ID read simply RENO and I thought she was selling time-shares. The kids raced to the mailbox because no one knew when John Glenn or Beau Bridges or Jim Belushi might drop us a line. Those who could not contribute often wrote or called to encourage Holly and to send me their best wishes. This was the most compelling, unintended consequence of the project. People wanted to honor their teachers, yes, but they were just as anxious to respond to Hollys genuine desire to do something significant for me. What she felt for the work I have cared about and committed to for more than thirty years work she saw as too often unappreciated so moved those she solicited that they volunteered their time and words in response to her resolve and faith in education in general and me in particular. I am honored.

It should not have surprised me. Almost every story in this book is told in the context of successful people recalling teachers who were willing to purchase, with time and effort, stock in their lives before they themselves knew they were worthy of the marketplace. As a result, these students purchased larger stakes in their own lives and made good on their teachers investments. That is the genius of the best teachers. One may teach the most demanding class in the school; another may have little concern for grades at all. But if they are like the teachers portrayed in this book, their students understand: these teachers demands are efforts to demonstrate to their students the talents and character they are not yet aware they possess.

As with my childrens births, my wife bore the labor of this book, and I coaxed a little at the end. However, that does not preclude me from having hopes for both.

For teachers, I hope they will recognize themselves in these stories. I can see almost everyone I work with in one or another.

For students and parents, I hope the same, that they will also see their teachers in these pages, because they are there. In my career, I have had the good fortune to teach great kids. Many are generous enough to write or stop at my classroom and express their thanks as they progress. For those kids, perhaps, I was a voice that spoke to them for the weeks or months when hearing someones voice could move them forward in their lives. Though it would gratify my ego to be the person to whom each responded in such a manner, I know I am not. I take much solace in that knowledge, however, as I consistently witness students in other classes finding themselves through other teachers efforts, some polar opposites of myself in our notions of how to run a classroom. I have encountered no one in this profession who has failed to affect at least a student or two in significant ways; most teachers do so every day, just as the teachers described in this book have.

I hope, finally, that if those who have little or no connection to schools stumble upon these stories, these pages will provide enough light to balance the dark aspersions that the media and politics often cast on my profession. I hope too that these readers will be reminded of the paradox education researchers consistently report: while respondents typically report that educators in this country perform unsatisfactorily, they just as characteristically rate their childrens teachers as above average or excellent. The public approves of the teachers who instruct our children every day yet disparage the more general notion of educators that the media and political wonks tell us are the reason for societys ills. This is the uncomfortable irony in which teachers exist.

MY HUSBAND, BRUCE, has been a high school English and social studies teacher for more than thirty years. In that time he has received countless letters from students and parents thanking him for the effect he has had on their lives. Yet even with all this gratitude, he still hesitates when someone asks what he does for a living.