Key to education is still the teacher

The first week of May is set aside each year as Teacher Appreciation Week. It is intended that we do something to commemorate the dedicated service provided by so many of the long list of men and women who have sacrificed every day for our benefit. Believe me, we can never do enough.

I have a long list of teachers to appreciate. Their faces and names, their spirit and enthusiasm are as vivid in my mind today as the people I meet on the streets of Cape Girardeau. Why do I remember them so well from so many years ago? They were the overworked, underpaid ladies of another age who were dedicated to my well-being, to my development as a person, to my future. How I would love to see them all again and be able to tell them that I did learn to multiply and that I did finally figure out when the two trains that left Chicago and Cleveland would pass each other. I want to tell them what they meant to me and that, despite all of the bumps and bruises, I did turn out all right.

All of us have similar memories. My purpose in writing this is to remind us all that education is largely a product of the relationship between a student and the teacher. When one talks about "education" or "school," it is not so much a place as it is a relationship, and that relationship is created primarily by the teacher. That relationship is like, as U.S. President James A. Garfield said, " ... a student on one end of a log and a teacher on the other." No matter how many computers or movie projectors we buy, the teacher is still the catalyst that makes the process work. To a child, the teacher is the school. And teaching is, indeed, the profession that teaches all the other professions.

Chrysler Chief Executive Lee Iacocca said, "In a truly rational world, the best of us would be teachers, and the rest of us would do something else." Henry Adams, who was the grandson and great-grandson of presidents said, "A teacher affects eternity. No one can tell where the teacher's influence stops."

In the final analysis, the whole purpose of the federal and state educational bureaucracies, the statewide taxation mechanism, the local investment of hundreds of millions of public and private monies in facilities and equipment is to have the best teachers possible, with the best preparation possible, into a positive learning environment with a group of students.

The teacher is the hub around which the education of our children revolves, and we will never be able to repay them for what they gave to us and continue to give to our young people every day.