Here’s a great teacher that I never had in class—my mother, Helen C. Conway.

How do I know she was a great teacher? At the time of her death, I was amazed at the number of her students who attended her wake and funeral. Nearly every one of them praised her teaching ability and her care and concern for students.

A year later, when our parents’ home was sold, I was responsible for going through Mom’s papers, including her class notes. It was fascinating to read how she approached classics of English literature including novels, plays and poetry. I still have those notes—nearly 20 years later.

Of course, growing up I knew that Mom loved to read. I remember looking at the books on the shelves in our home library and seeing diverse titles like Francis Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and, of course, William Shakespeare’s collected works.

When I began to write a regular newspaper column for Catholic newspapers, Mom was my greatest supporter. But she was also my most serious critic—never hesitating to correct my writing style or question my thinking on a given subject.

Of course my mother taught me a lot more than literature and writing. She taught all her children  faith and values and she was a powerful witness to God’s love and forgiveness.

She loved to quote the poet Alexander Pope:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never Is, but always To be blest.The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from Home,Rests and expatriates in a life to come. 

Hope springs eternal, Mom would say. She taught us many things, but how to be filled with hope was at the top of the list!

Speaking of great teachers, I want to celebrate two of my high school English teachers, Dorothy C. Ferster (above) and Mae P. Brown. 

I took Mrs. Brown’s English class my sophomore year, second semester. We read classics like Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal by Jonathon Swift and Looking Backward, a novel by Edward Bellamy. Her insights made these wonderful stories come alive, and she helped us think critically about the authors’ intentions versus the skills required to make their work successful across different eras and cultures. 

Mrs. Brown was “old school” in her relationships with students. You never doubted her authority or the fact that she was in command of the subject matter.  When a student misbehaved in class (we were sophomores after all), she was calm but firm. As a result, Mrs. Brown was someone students respected and looked up to.  I’m grateful for all that Mrs. Brown taught me—about English literature and about life. 

In Mrs. Ferster’s classes my senior year, we read Shakespeare and the Bronte sisters and many other masterpieces of English literature. It was pure joy. Her love for these great works was transparent and contagious. I still remember an animated discussion she led about “the pathetic fallacy” (an author’s use of nature to illustrate ideas or moods in a story). 

Mrs. Ferster taught me to be a writer. “You have the potential to be a great writer,” she once told me. “But you’re not there yet. From now on I’m going to give you two separates grades for each essay. One will be for style. The other will be for content.”

Mrs. Ferster was teaching me to be more than a facile writer. She wanted me to be substantive. She could tell that it was relatively easy for me to sit down and compose something on paper, but I didn’t always take the time to research my subject or to make sure that my content (as she called it) was as good as my writing style. 

I am deeply indebted to these strong, intelligent and caring women for their efforts to help me grow as a person and as someone who appreciates English language and literature. I doubt that I would have been even modestly successful as a writer if it were not for their guidance and encouragement. 

Looking back more than 50 years to the formation I received from these (and several other) great teachers fills me with a profound sense of gratitude. A thousand thanks to Mae Brown and Dorothy Ferster for the gifts they gave me as a young man!

A great teacher shares with her students more than knowledge. She shares wisdom, a perspective on life that unites experience and understanding. She challenges students to think critically (and clearly), to make judgements based not on current fashion but on time honored truths. And she encourages them not only to think for themselves but to break free from conventional thinking and practices to establish new possibilities, new ways of viewing the world. 

Margaret Ann Peel Jones was a great teacher. My first encounter with her was my junior year in high school. I enrolled in her Asian History class. The first day I thought I’d made a terrible mistake. She didn’t begin like other teachers—reviewing the syllabus and setting the ground rules. She engaged in a “stream of consciousness” raising all kinds of issues about America’s relationship with China and Japan dating back to the earliest days of our republic. She reminded us that we are a relatively new nation struggling to understand and come to terms with nations and cultures that are ancient, beyond our comprehension. 

That first day began a conversation that continued until the semester’s end and beyond. It included Saturday morning trips to the Cleveland Art Museum (for those who wished) to experience something of Asian art. And we even sampled authentic Asian cuisine to the limited extent it was available in northeast Ohio in 1966!

The following year, when I was a senior, I signed up for two more of Mrs. Jones’s classes—semesters 1 and 2 of Modern European History. Same conversation, new venue. The subject was the history of “modern” Europe,  but Mrs. Jones made sure we made the necessary connections with Ancient Greece and Rome. She strongly disagreed with the notion that the Middle Ages were “dark ages” taking every opportunity to point out how light continued to shine throughout  this fascinating period in western culture. 

In all her classes, we spent time exchanging ideas, watching films, listening to music and, of course, reading about people, events and the historic currents that led directly from ancient to modern to post modern history. With Mrs. Jones, the focus was on more than kings and queens, pope’s and churchmen. We tried to understand what “ordinary” people were experiencing and to ask ourselves in what ways our lives were better, worse or pretty much the same as the people who came before us in the various epochs we studied. 

I graduated, of course, and moved away from Cleveland and from Mrs. Jones and her classes, but we managed to stay in touch.  I visited her when I could. And we exchanged Christmas cards long after I was married and had children and Mrs. Jones was retired and in a nursing home. One year, the nursing home sent our Christmas card back as undeliverable.  No forwarding address. 

The best tribute I can pay to this great teacher is to say that I miss her and that the conversation continues more than 50 years later.