I was sitting in the woods this weekend contemplating life and for some reason my mind wandered back to my days in elementary school at Riverside in Rome! It was an amazing childhood with a k-8 school and rarely more than 20 kids in a class! As I thought through my years, I stopped on 6th Grade! I can remember every teacher I had at Riverside like it was yesterday, but Mrs. Phyllis Hines is the teacher that changed my life in more ways than I have ever really thought about! She was the foundation of everything that I became and she changed my view of school forever!
I hated to read! I had always faked my way through summer reading programs and usually just did what was required for class! When I took the reading tests that were required at the time, my reading level came back way below grade level! It wasn’t because I couldn’t read, but those passages were just too long so I didn’t read them at all and just guessed at all of the answers! Since my mother was the manager of a bookstore, you can imagine that did not go over well! Also, my older brother had set a standard that I always had to live up to, but never really cared enough to work too hard at! Something had to change, at least in my parent’s eyes!
This is where Mrs. Hines took me under her wing! She encouraged me to find something I liked and not books other people chose for me. She told my parents to let me pick out anything I found interesting at the bookstore and just start reading an hour a day. Read anything. Up to this point, I had always been told what to read or told to read only highly educational books. I looked at books every day at the bookstore, but never really thought about most of them which weren’t in my category!
One day not long after Mrs. Hines said to read anything, I was walking around the bookstore and saw the book MASH! I did not even know there was a book about MASH! I loved TV and MASH was my favorite show! Now that might be a book I could get into! My mom wasn’t sure about it, but agreed to let me try it! It was slow at first, because even though it is a satire, it is a fairly complicated book. Mrs. Hines let me read it during free reading time and encouraged me to find others like it. I did. After I finished the first, I found out that there were many others that had the same characters and they travelled all over the world! I loved them and had to search for many of them at used bookstores because they were out of print. When I could not find one and had nothing to read, Mrs. Hines encouraged me to find things on topics connected to MASH. I began to read histories of the Korean War, then World War II and beyond! I read about the geography of the places the MASH characters travelled! When I found a new MASH book, I’d stop and read it, then go back to my history books!
Because of Mrs. Hines, I developed a love of reading and a love of history! I made a custom reading box out of an old cigar box and carried it around with my current book everywhere I went! In the one year I had Mrs. Hines, she changed everything in my life! She worked with me all the time when I had questions about things in books I was reading. She encourage me to keep reading through the summer and never stop! I began to love reading so much that I started collecting books! I ended up with over 10,000, which I am still trying to narrow down today! After the first time I moved, no one would ever help me move again thanks to those books, but that is another story!
As we always have to, I left Mrs. Hines to finish elementary school! By 8th grade, my reading level was on a 12th grade level! That was a change of almost 8 years from where I had started in Mrs. Hines class! I went in to high school loving history and reading all the time! I even talked a teacher into teaching me 3 independent studies in my 12th grade year in history! I am pretty sure I am the only person to ever graduate from Model High School having taken Russian History, British History, and Middle Eastern History! I loved it and read probably 50 books in those 3 classes combined!
When I began college, I knew history was my field, but I intended to use it to go to law school! After trying law, I realized I did not enjoy it and looked at possibly being a teacher myself! The first time I ever walked into a classroom as a teacher, I knew it was my life! After 30 years of teaching history, I have no regrets about that choice! And it was all due to one amazing teacher, Mrs. Phyllis Hines!
As everyone honors teachers this week, I want to honor the teacher that had faith in me and helped me find my path in life! All of you that had me as a teacher owe a debt to her as well because she taught me what it truly meant to be a teacher and to change lives and I tried to live that every day of my careeer!
I found Mrs. Hines on Facebook after I came out of the woods! I hope you read this and realize how many lives you changed! As I celebrate my first teacher appreciation week enjoying retirement, I hope all of you still in the classroom know that every day you change lives! Be sure that change is always positive and that you don’t let the outside clutter of teaching make you loose focus on the only thing that really matters! The students!! Thank you Mrs. Hines and all current and former teachers! You are the often unsung heroes of this nation! Have a great week and a great end of the year!
