Last week I received a series of texts from my oldest granddaughter that, in Tin Pan Alley parlance, made the strings of my heart zing. She said that she was studying Beowulf and was “loving” the class. Then she sent a picture of her teacher, dressed in what looked like a dinosaur costume.

At first, I was puzzled. Never did I think that I would see the words “Beowulf” and “love” in close proximity. Even in translation from original, the poem is tough going. And I couldn’t figure out what Barney had to do with Beowulf. I finally decided that the costume was probably a dragon rather than a dinosaur.

But the cause of my elation was that my high-school-senior granddaughter was enthusiastic about her class, her teacher, and a 1400-year-old poem.

Here’s someone who read pretty much incessantly from the time she learned to read until she got to high school. Then someone flipped a switch. She still read what she had to. She still made very good grades. But if you asked her about school, you got one of two reactions: either she didn’t like it or she hated it, according to how the day had gone.

I wondered how much of this was attributable to teenage angst and how much was a rational evaluation of the instruction by a very smart young lady.

Now I’m leaning to the latter, partly because of my own experiences. In sixteen-plus years of instruction, I was blessed with a number of good teachers and a few great ones. I also endured several that treated their classes like the line at the DMV.

In the latter category was the professor I had to study Shakespeare under in college. The Bard was required, it was taught by only one professor, and by him only once a year. The professor sucked all the laughter out of the comedies and all of the spirit out of the tragedies. His only real interest was in the bones of the plays.

His tests generally consisted of about ninety quotes. We were expected to identify the act, scene, and who said it to whom.

Once I graduated I didn’t read another Shakespeare play for over thirty years.

On the other side was my Modern American Poetry professor, George Herring, PhD and sometimes SOB. To say that George was eccentric would be understatement: he threatened to resign one time because the administration had put up “Keep Off the Grass” signs. But he made the subject come alive. He was sometimes vicious in his comments on our explications, but that just made us dig in harder. George loved literature, and he loved to spark thinking about literature.

George had some advantages over normal people. He had a near-perfect memory; he seldom used notes, even on the longer poems. He had an awe-inspiring personality. If you didn’t know him, you thought he was weird. If you did know him, you knew he was really weird. He had been a lot of places and done a lot of things and gave the impression that he had affected them more than they had affected him.

Now, nearly sixty years after fact, I still remember the Modern American Poetry final. It was one sentence long: Trace the evolution of American Poetry from Whitman forward, using appropriate examples.

The final was on a Friday. He wrote the question on the board, told us that it was due by Monday noon, and we could use any resources we could find. Then he left.  

There were others. Dr. Sossomon, who in a single quarter, connected the dots in more than 700 years of history. Josifina Niggli, who may well be responsible for me not spending the rest of my life flipping burgers. Mr. Wallace, who spoke a half-dozen languages and didn’t seem to understand why everybody didn’t. And in high school, at least two: Mrs. Lambert, who made sure that when it came to verb conjugations there would be nothing left for me to learn in college, and Judson Stephens, who terrified me to the point that I learned Algebra anyway.

For a long time, there have been arguments about teacher accountability. I, like everyone else, have opinions on that, but not enough knowledge to know whether any of them are valid. But, from my own experience, I do know some things.

Whether students like or do not like a teacher isn’t an appropriate evaluation. God knows I didn’t like Mr. Stephens' algebra class, but he made it important to us. I didn’t have much good to say about Mrs. Lambert’s English classes either, until I found that I had a much firmer foundation in grammar than a lot of my college freshman classmates. (I went back and told her that, and she just sniffed. She knew what she was doing.)

The old saw that “those who can, do. And those who can’t, teach.” is a base canard. A good teacher, like a good doctor, a good writer, or a good tax attorney, can make a great difference. In fact, you could make an argument that the teacher makes a greater difference than the others.

And, finally, we do need to find a way to identify and release the teachers who phone it in, who are simply serving their time until retirement, or really don’t know what they’re talking about. And we need to elevate those who are left to their proper position in our communities, rewarding them for the difference they are making.

I’m particularly grateful for the teacher in the dragon costume. Because of her, there’s a chance that my granddaughter will make it through the education system without having her love for literature extinguished.