“Excuse me, sir.”
That is something I often hear “in the wild” as a teacher. It is usually accompanied by “the look” as a signal that a former student has recognized me. If you’re a teacher, you’ll have stories of all the unexpected places you have run into a former student. Grocery stores, malls, swimming pools, skating rinks, airports, restaurants…, you name it, we’ve seen “the look” in the most unexpected places. The subsequent conversations are usually quick: checking on how they’re doing, what they’re up to, or friends of theirs that we both know. In this iteration, I was heading into a local LA fitness on a Saturday afternoon for a swim.
This time, however, I was surprised because I didn’t get the look as this former student called me after I had already passed the front desk. He chose to chase me down to have a conversation. It took him a few “excuse me’s”, and after the initial “Hi, were you a teacher at … ?” introductions, the conversation went unexpectedly.
He told me I probably don’t remember him, because he was never a student in my class nor was he involved in any extracurricular activities that I had supervised.
“Then how do you know me?” I asked.
We once had an interaction in the hallway. He was an ESL student and couldn’t do the scheduled oral presentation that day. I comforted him when he was crying in the hallway from the frustration and the anxiety. He then told me how I calmed him and said I would advocate for him with his teacher to do the presentation another day. He said he never forgot the interaction and it helped him tremendously for his high school career.
I was dumbfounded because I do not remember a single detail from this interaction. It was as if I had amnesia and this person was describing to me an experience of a different person. We chatted some more took a picture and I was on my way. Funny how these seemingly innocent interactions can have different effects on different people. He said he’ll never forget that moment for the rest of his life, meanwhile, I do not recall any of it.
Most teachers I know set their own standards very high in order to affect the lives of the students they interact with. They work tirelessly to give their students (hopefully) something they’ll keep for the rest of their life. I have learned that it’s not the experiences that you intend that are the ones that stay in their memory. They are these insignificant interactions that you will not remember 10 years from now that would be ingrained in their memories forever.
Students may not remember (anything?)everything you taught them. But they’ll never forget how you made them feel.
Teachers are People too 