Celebrate Your Teacher Today

Teachers make a remarkable impression on our lives. Growing up, we spent a third of our time sitting in those cookie-cutter classrooms, hunched over uncomfortable desks, as our instructors taught us how to be people. Almost everything we know in life is the direct result of their choice to become educators. They taught us how to communicate, how to do math, how to tell time. Without teachers laying the foundational skills in the great minds of engineers, scientists, or entrepreneurs, we could not have built towering sky scrapers, or set foot on the moon, or created the internet. With everything teachers do for us, it takes someone extraordinary to stand out in our minds; someone who goes the extra mile to not just lay the foundations, but to take us to heights within ourselves we were as yet unaware of. On National Teacher Appreciation day, we should take the time to think back on those teachers of repute, and to thank them for all they have done for us.

Mr. Debari, who taught geometry when I was a student at Rutherford High School, was one such teacher. Teaching a rigid subject that does not allow much room for creativity, he was able to inject the droll material with a sense of excitement. He used his charismatic personality and fun-loving nature to encourage a collaborative learning environment. You could not sit in the back of his classroom and expect to shirk the responsibility of classroom participation. Debari, also a basketball coach, was able to inspire his class to come together and work through seemingly impossible problems as though they were a team playing for a championship, on a daily basis. Learning in his classroom was no longer a matter of memorization and regurgitation, of rinse and repeat, it was a communal goal that all students worked towards as one.

One of my favorite memories of high school came at the end of a particularly trying geometry lesson. A rather difficult problem had the class befuddled for the better half of third period; we just could not work out the solution. As the end of the period neared, a sense of dread spread through the group as we sensed the indomitable bell buzzer looming over our every calculator computation. In one last desperate gambit, we tried something entirely new, something not one of us would have thought of on our own. Brandishing our over-priced Texas Instruments adding machines like a knight brandishes a sword, we overcame that beast of math problem just as the class bell tolled. In a true coach’s fashion, Mr. Debari brought the students together in a circle in the front of the room, had everyone put his or her hand into the center, told us he was proud of our effort, and had us yell ‘BULLDOGS!’ on the count of 3; we should have been changing classes.

Truthfully, we should be thanking all of our teachers on a regular basis. However, that is exceedingly impractical, so let us take the time on National Teacher Appreciation day to honor those impactful teachers who made us become who we are today. Thank you, Mr. Debari, and thank you to all teachers, for everything that you do for us.

In honor of Mr. Debari, and the Rutherford Education Foundation, check out our previous post by them, Making a Game out of Education.