It’s never too late to thank our teachers

I could have been the original child left behind and it was teachers who saved me.

There was the ROTC sergeant who asked an angry high school principal not to suspend me. There was the English teacher who gave my theme on Silas Marner an A-plus when she could have failed me. There was the sponsor of my school newspaper, who, for reasons known only to her, invited me to join the staff of the Bear Facts.

Teachers are like that. They step into our lives when we’re not expecting it. They rescue us and they encourage us. They do things that have nothing to do with learning or report cards.

And sometimes we don’t even say thank you.

This is Teacher Appreciation Week, a time for students to give their teachers a card or a small gift. But what about those of us who graduated in another era? Is it too late for us to say “thank you” to teachers who offered us a helping hand?

Years ago, after my first book was published, I sent an autographed copy to the English teacher who overlooked the fact I knew nothing about Silas. When she signed my yearbook that year she said she hoped that one day I’d write a book and sign it for her. That’s what I did, and it made both of us cry.

A couple of years ago, I heard the sponsor of my school paper was in a rehab center. I stopped by to see her and we became friends. I was grateful for her encouragement when I was a teenager and she was grateful to know that one of her staff members became a real writer. I said “thank you,” by being a pallbearer at her funeral.

It’s never too late to show our teachers how much we appreciate them. Every teacher gave us something, whether it was how to make nouns and verbs agree or whether it was memorizing the symbols on a periodic table.

But it’s the special ones we cherish most. They did for us things they didn’t learn in the School of Education. They came to us at a crossroads and they changed our lives. They were there for us at moments we needed them and those are the gestures we never forget.

This story was originally published April 30, 2016 at 9:21 PM with the headline "It’s never too late to thank our teachers."