Thank a Teacher

I learned in February that someone I was quite close to passed away suddenly. Sue was a dear, lifelong friend, and also my sixth-grade teacher 50 years ago. Part of me would like to think that I was her favorite student, but I know that wasn’t true — all of her students were her favorite students. That’s how she made us feel.

The most important lesson I learned from her is something that I believe our faculty here at Lawrenceville know well, which is that teaching is about love and trust. That’s exactly how she approached it, and I have spent my career trying to live up to and to live by that standard she set.

When I say that teaching is about love and trust, it is because great teachers invest deeply in their students. They get to know them, and they see possibilities and potential that the young learner doesn’t yet realize. And it doesn’t work if you don’t truly know your student. Push someone to achieve before they are ready, and you simply teach them their limitations. But start with caring and trust, and knowing exactly when to push, and you open up a world of opportunity for that young person.

So that’s the thing: We knew she loved us, and we loved her right back, and with that came trust — whatever she said, it had to be true. A few months into that school year, she said that we would be putting on a play called The Music Man, as in, the Broadway musical. We thought, “OK, if she says so, then that’s what we’re doing!” We did it, and we were proud of it. Later in the year when she told us we were going to perform scenes from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, we shrugged and said, “Well, why not Shakespeare?” And we did that, too.

I went into teaching because of these experiences, and I have loved my career, every bit of it. In addition to having been fortunate to be her student, I was lucky enough that we stayed in touch, that she cared enough to do so. One of the biggest challenges of my life was accepting the position as head of school here almost eleven years ago. Talk about imposter’s syndrome. I wrote to her to tell her I was moving back to New Jersey, and I invited her to my installation. I spent weeks writing my speech, and I sure was nervous.

When the day arrived, I was up at the podium looking out at the crowd, and then I saw her in the second row, looking up at me with this happy smile. And just like when I was about to go on stage as Harold Hill in The Music Man 40 years earlier, I thought, “She seems to think I can do this; maybe I can.”

We’d have dinner maybe once a year, and we’d talk. I always looked forward to those evenings, and I treasure them now.

A few years ago, I came across a story in The New York Times. The author, a writer, is visiting his childhood hometown and is browsing in a used-book store. He finds a book of old photos of the town from 1930s. He sees a picture of schoolchildren from the local school of the era, and something about a little girl in the front row gives him a feeling. He looks at the name in the caption, and it is his first-grade teacher. A wave of nostalgia washes over him.

On a whim, he tracks down her home number through information. He calls, and she picks up; she must have been in her eighties. He identifies himself and says, “I just had to call you. You taught me to read, taught me to love the magic of words, and you opened up a whole world for me that led to my career as a writer. I just want to thank you, but you probably get these calls all the time.”

There was silence for a moment on the line, and she says, “No, you’re the first.”

And he ends his essay by saying, “Thank a teacher.”

I love the message in that essay, all the more so because I am grateful that I had the opportunity to at least try to thank Sue for all that she did for so many of us and for all that she meant to me. I don’t know that I ever quite had the words to fully convey how I felt, but I think in the end she knew.

Sincerely,

Stephen S. Murray H’54 ’55 ’63 ’65 ’16 P’16 ’21
The Shelby Cullom Davis Class of 1926 Head of School