What is our Impact?

MRCPL Children CC BY-SA2.0

As a classroom teacher I tried to bring the best of the models that I had. Some of those models were teachers I had growing up; others were teachers I admired as I went through my program in college. I have vivid and positive memories of sixth grade. At the end of each day, our teachers would have the students in all four classes –the entire grade level–moved into the team room and spent the last minutes of the day reading a novel aloud to us.

We would look forward to one teacher in particular because she would get so involved in reading the novels –the characters, the voices. I distinctly remember her reading The Westing Game to us….so much so that when I taught fifth grade, The Westing Game was one of the novels that I chose to read to my own class. I tried so hard to get the voices just as perfectly as she did. I am quite certain that I did not, and they were never consistent from day-to-day. It was no easy task as there are so many characters in that novel. It made what she did seem even more amazing all those years later.

How incredible, though, that fifteen years after-the-fact, the impact she had on me– therefore on so many classes of students and my wanting to carry on a tradition of reading a treasured novel and sharing that experience with my own students. Now that’s impact.