The Teacher Who Let Me Learn

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Who was your most influential teacher? Why?

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My most influential teacher was Mrs McLean.

She was young, recently back from Canada with her husband, and drove a Mustang they had imported. To a high school student, that alone gave her a certain mystique. But that is not why she mattered to me.

She mattered because she understood me without making a fuss about it.

By the time I was fifteen, I had already worked out something important about myself: I learned best by teaching myself. If I had to sit and listen to the teacher for too long, the fog would roll in. My mind would blur because I am not an auditory learner. I learn best by reading and by doing.

So I sat on my own at the front of the class, right in front of Mrs McLean’s desk, and worked ahead. She could see exactly what I was doing. I was not hiding. I was not pretending to listen while doing something else. I was learning in the way that suited me. If I got stuck, I would listen. If I understood, I kept going.

Many teachers might have been irritated by that. Some might have felt offended. Mrs McLean did not. She never embarrassed me, never questioned me, never insisted that I conform to the usual pattern just for the sake of it. She saw what was happening and gave me space.

That was the gift.

I did well in her class. But what stayed with me was not the result. It was the freedom. She gave me permission to learn as myself.

Looking back, I do not think her influence came from being the smartest teacher in the mathematics department. It came from something deeper and rarer: interpersonal wisdom. She knew how to create a warm learning environment. She did not need to control every part of the classroom in order to teach well. She understood that good teaching is not always about directing learning. Sometimes it is about making room for it.

That is what made her influential. She did not control the learning; she created a learning space.

Even outside the classroom, she had that kind of warmth. After our school formal, some of us briefly went to the teachers’ party at her home. She was relatively new to the school, but already seemed to have a natural ease with people. She was the kind of person others gathered around.

I never saw her again after I left school. Someone once told me she may have gone on to become a school principal, though I have never been able to confirm it. If she did, that makes sense to me. She had the relational intelligence for it.

Looking back, I think that is why she mattered so much. The most influential teachers are not always the ones who give you the most information. Sometimes they are the ones who see something in you — a way of thinking, a way of learning, a possibility — and respond to it with trust.

Mrs McLean did that for me. And I have never forgotten her.