Memories of the influence of a teacher

Dear Holly Lee,

Thanks for your letter reminding me next week is National Teacher Appreciation Week. I'm glad your PTA is celebrating it at Beechwoods Elementary in Greenhills. I'm happy to send along a memory of one of my own teachers.

Her name was Mrs. Schlossnagel, and I'm not making it up. Fourth-grade teachers always have great names.

To be honest, I'm not sure how Mrs. Schlossnagel would have fit in the accountability-driven world of education today. I'm not sure how my whole fourth-grade year would have fit, in fact.

Our elementary school was so overcrowded that my class was the one assigned to a creaky old church annex next to the school.

You know those classrooms where things work like clockwork? Well, ours wasn't one of them. Sometimes we sped through units and sometimes we skidded to a stop and went back for second helpings. Things sneaked up on us all the time that year, like vacations and standardized tests and the end of the day.

We all understood that our classroom was slightly out of control. The lesson plan did not fall open to the current date, nor did the day proceed like an act of God, as it had in Mrs. Mumaw's third-grade class. We spent a good portion of every day telling Mrs. Schlossnagel what we already knew, what we didn't know and why we couldn't understand that day's lesson.

It was the year we figured out teachers didn't have all the answers.

Learning from each other

And we all knew how hard Mrs. Schlossnagel was trying.

For all the mistakes she may have made that year, the one she didn't make was doubting our ability. She believed we could help her teach better. And she had this way, onebyone, of seeing the future that lay within us.

My date with Mrs. Schlossnagel's destiny came in November. We were preparing for the Thanksgiving assembly.

There's a format to these things. You march in, sit on the gym floor in chairs arranged by grade levels, sing some thankful-sounding songs, and the principal wraps things up with something profound.

It was a chance to show parents their kids could march and sing, and nobody expected anything more. But a week before the assembly, Mrs. Schlossnagel pulled me aside and asked if I would read my Thanksgiving poem at the assembly.

Would I? Would I ever.

A moment in the spotlight

At that very moment, I knew that one day I'd be a writer.

It sounds like such a small thing, as I type it onto the computer screen. I guess you'd have to know how much I love this work to know how it shaped my life.

I'm sure, as part of your teacher-appreciation project, you will get letters from people who were saved from drugs or dropping out by teachers. You'll hear about teachers who thought up great science experiments, or took fantastic field trips, or made trigonometry seem easy.

Then it won't sound so grand when I tell you that Mrs. Schlossnagel let me hear the sound of my own voice. But it was grand to me.

I hope teachers can really do all we expect of them today. I hope they can facilitate and mediate, solve the crime problem and lead our country past the Germans, Japanese and Koreans. I guess that's what their job is now.

But I hope they still have time to read Thanksgiving poems, and to figure out which kid needs a minute behind a microphone.

Maybe Mrs. Schlossnagel didn't change the world, but she sure changed mine.

Krista Ramsey's column appears in The Enquirer on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati 45202 or fax at 768-8340.

Published May 4, 1996.