Why am I a teacher?

Why am I a teacher?

Posted on September 8th, 2023 by Scott Warnock

I was sending emails about this year’s Palmyra High School Foundation for Educational Excellence (PHSFEE) Casino Night–there’s a reason for this opening, I promise I’m not softening you up in an effort to sell tickets for our fundraiser–and as usual a few messages bounced.

One puzzled me. Initially it appeared as a cryptic series of letters before the @–and then I remembered it was the address of my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Roseann DiMeglio. We had connected online years ago and stayed in touch. Of course she would be on my education foundation mailing list.

When the message bounced, I got a bad feeling. Alas, I was right. A quick web search revealed that on June 22, 2021–more than two years ago!–my teacher Roseann DiMeglio died. I read her obituary.

Recently, I was asked a simple question by a student: When did you know you wanted to be a teacher? I’m sure I’ve been asked that, but I was struck with how dumbfounded I was in my response. I realized I didn’t have a thing, an incident, a concrete moment that I could point to.

I had some good teachers along the way. I enjoyed coaching after college. I wanted a teaching assistant position as I started my MA program. But… why?

When I received that bounced email, I reflected on my second-grade experiences with Mrs. DiMeglio. I loved her. Some of my friends recalled her as strict, but to me she wasn’t that way at all. She was kind to me and, more importantly, motivated in me an eagerness for learning and specifically writing and reading.

Running atop the chalkboard in her class was a banner that looked like a long strip of wide-ruled loose-leaf paper. On that banner each letter was represented in cursive, both upper and lower case. I remember staring at those cursive characters on the lined “paper,” and I recall being impatient as we proceeded through the alphabet. I remember I wrote a note to my mom one night, and I was frustrated because my note was flawed because I was using several letters before we had reviewed the correct way to form them in class. (I chuckled thinking that Mrs. DiMeglio might be the “cause” of my to-this-day wretched penmanship, because I never did learn to make some of these letters the right way.)

Early literacy memories–five decades ago.

I then considered my involvement with a public school education foundation and with my local school board(s). What spurred this education-focused civic engagement?

So I went back to the question the student asked me about my motivation to be a teacher.

Looking at that bounceback email (it strikes me what a melancholy genre the bounceback email is) I realized that our best teachers’ impact stretches into our lives for years, maybe decades. Sometimes only much later will we realize what they were doing for us: “Yes, I see it now.”

I had returned to Berlin Community School several times when I was in grad school, and I had caught up with Mrs. DiMeglio. So I did tell her how important she was to me. I don’t know if I had the perspective, though, at that time in my life, to really say that she was a model of good teaching for me perhaps when I was a learner, only seven and eight years old, just a little guy who wanted to make his cursive letters.

Of course this is bittersweet because I’m writing this now, two years after she has passed. But that’s the thing about writing in particular, that its force can carry on long beyond its source.

I still want it to be known that Mrs. DiMeglio supplied me with early inspiration to help me want to teach–and write. I may know it now more than I ever have.

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Scott Warnock

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.