Teachers - sowing seeds of potential
For the last several years, my Examiner assignments have included interviewing valedictorians and salutatorians for the graduation pullout section. I don’t recall talking to one of these exemplary students who did not name one or more “special” teachers who had a positive influence on their education. I’m not a teacher but I imagine that working with these high achievers is satisfying and a reward in itself because through nature or nurture, they are enthusiastic about learning, may already have goals, and don’t have to be prodded every step of the way.
I was not one of those students. I’ve shared with readers in other columns that my mother had what people in the 50s and 60s called “a nervous breakdown” as I entered my teens. My poor dad was beside himself and really didn’t know what to do. We never talked about it but we shared the same coping mechanism - retreat.
He fished and hunted more, and eventually bought a horse which occupied his time. I escaped to my friends’ homes where no one asked me about my mother. School during my teen years was a disaster and no one would have used adjectives like “mature” or “motivated” to describe me, except where the school newspaper was concerned and that wouldn’t come till later.
Where is all this going? In the eighth grade, I was placed in a new homeroom, a story in itself, but my new homeroom teacher saw something in me that prompted extra effort on her part. That teacher was Mrs. Knebel.
I have an image of Mrs. Knebel engrained in my mind. She has this look of distress on her face, and whether she conscious of it or not, she is wringing her hands. Mrs. Knebel took this pose a lot when talking to me!
It seemed almost daily she exhorted me to work to my “potential” or told me how much more I was capable of doing. I didn’t believe in this “potential” she talked about and gave in to the wave that swept me into her class to begin with, sort of drifting and hoping to keep the family secret, secret.
Mrs. Knebel had two smart, accomplished daughters a little younger than I and one performed in children’s theater in downtown Houston. Many times, she invited me to the plays and I went. I was an adult before I wondered what the Knebel girls thought about their mother dragging me along, or understood that besides exposing me to culture, she was teaching me good manners. There were other outings with Mrs. Knebel and her daughters, and I don’t remember being jealous, just not wanting them to know what my own mother was like.
Having heard from this year’s crop of seniors about the teachers who impacted their lives, I felt compelled to thank the Mrs. Knebels out there. Hopefully, the immediate reward and satisfaction they reap from working with their stellar students will carry them through the times when they have to dig a little deeper to reach those at the other end of the education spectrum. For many of those pupils, all the Mrs. Knebels of the world will ever get to do is plant seeds of “potential,” never knowing if they bear fruit.
I’ll end with what I think is a very appropriate quote from radio and television writer Andy Rooney, “Most of us end up with no more than five or six people who remember us. Teachers have thousands of people who remember them for the rest of their lives.”
Connie Clements is a freelance reporter for the Navasota Examiner and award-winning columnist. She writes feature news articles on a weekly basis and an opinion column as the mood strikes her.