Teacher and Student

For a long time (almost 19 years), I taught at a girls' prep school in New Orleans. Just outside my classroom in the old science wing (my classroom had earlier been the "new" library) was a breezeway winding down past a history/English classroom and the music room. Along that breezeway were old wooden benches on which my students and I sat when conferring about their writing.

Among the treasured things I took with me when I left that school was this photograph, which my friend Cathy, a former development director, gave me. It has been sitting in my office at my new school and reminds me of the girls, all now young women, I taught at McGehee's over three different decades.One of those young women, Meredith (listening intently in the photograph above), and I have recently been chatting through Facebook. She now teaches at her alma mater and also coaches volleyball. When I taught her in 8th and 10th grades, she lacked confidence in her reading, writing, and voice. During her senior English class with me, however, poetry gave her a voice. Indeed, she wrote such a beautiful personal essay that she used it as a college essay. Later, her peers chose it for publication in the school's literary magazine. In one of our last FB wall-to-walls, she wrote that she was the highest achieving student in her freshman composition course.

I always loved Meredith, and I know she knows it, too.