The Back School Special "The Teacher Who Changed My Life"

Good educators share knowledge. Great ones make an impression that stays in their students’ hearts forever.

THE SURPRISE THANK-YOU

By Karin Brulliard

RARELY DO TEACHERS know whether they make lasting impressions on students, and finding out they did can be one of the most profound rewards of all. I know because it happened to my mother, a retired teacher, when she turned on NPR one morning.

I was visiting my parents in 2003 when my mom came out of their room with a puzzled look on her face. She’d been listening to the radio and heard an interview with a bestselling author of young-adult fantasy novels. The woman’s name was Tamora Pierce, the same as a precocious young writer my mom had taught nearly four decades before. My mother wondered, Could this be the same person?

Well, I said (probably far too snarkily), the Internet should be able to tell us. I found the author’s website quickly. She was a big deal—an “enormously popular” writer, as a New York Times review put it, of books featuring powerful heroines.

I clicked on the biography link to scan for references to Burlingame Junior High, where my mom had worked, and my heart began to flutter when I spotted it at the bottom of the first section. Here was confirmation that my mother had taught a now-famous writer! But my eyes came to a standstill reading the next paragraph, in which Pierce described writing her first fiction as a sixth-grader.

“The next year, as I was still scribbling my own stories, my English teacher (bless you, Mrs. Jacobsen!) introduced me to the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien,” the biography read. “I got hooked on fantasy, and then on science fiction, and both made their way into my stories.”

My mother’s name was Mary Jacobson.