A Love letter to my teachers

As the start of school looms, teachers have earned appreciation for more than a week in May or during tragedies like school shootings or a pandemic. Teachers train all other professions.

People who boast about pulling themselves up with their bootstraps have amnesia. If I tried to pull myself with bootstraps, they would have broken, and my boots would have remained firmly on the floor. No, in my tiny school in my tiny town, I had some dedicated motivators called teachers.

I was an abysmal student in grade school. I didn’t like to read. Writing was a struggle. I despised math, and I had a speech impediment that sent me to a one-on-one speech teacher who helped conquer tongue twisters, like “Sammy snake slithered on seashells.”

I wasn’t a troublemaker, but the notion that school was fun and necessary is now how I regard rock climbing. My disdain for the printed page landed me in remedial reading, but luckily with my former kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Cue. In her twilight teaching years, she shouldered the burden of teaching the remedial, me.

She quickly introduced the Hardy Boys’ magic. Even though I read word by word, I solved the mystery with my new pals Frank and Joe.

Frank and Joe kept me company through junior high. I escaped remedial reading, but not the mysteries. Mrs. Cue kept me supplied. Mostly junior high was a swamp of hormones, pimples while trying not to crush on every girl I saw. But band was offered. We bought a secondhand cornet, and I slowly learned to play with volume being my forte.

High school was just a few stairs up from junior high, but a world away. By then there was a new band director, Mrs. Ashby. She cared more about accurate notes than sheer volume. She gave individual and group lessons. Somehow, she saw a trumpet player in a pudgy ninth-grader, and I began to love band for the next four years.

Because of Mrs. Ashby, by the time I graduated, I competed in individual and group contests, played taps for military funerals, and later played in the college pep band surrounded by music major trumpet players who easily covered my mistakes.

I also joined choir. Ms. Rech was five feet nothing, but she had a big goal of having us sing in parts that didn’t start dogs howling. She found a voice. Because of Ms. Rech, I became an amateur wedding singer, crooning all the 1970s wedding hits.

Being in choir meant being a candidate for high school theater. Mr. Daleiden was an English teacher/play director. He was hippie too late. Male teachers wore ties and sometimes even suits. Daleiden didn’t. He sometimes wore tie dye pants.

He had shoulder-length red hair and a beard. He was a shock to Shellsburg.

He even wrote an original play we started rehearsing without a final act written. It caused copious sweating as the performance date crept closer. He finished it. Now, that I ponder, I think it was like life. You start living it, not knowing what the final act holds.

He challenged our thinking. He made us better.

A classroom has four walls with dreams inside. Thanks for making my dreams real even when I didn’t know I had them.

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to public schools for 38 years. BruceLear2419@gmail.com