Making a Difference

If you ask people who their favorite teacher was, they can usually come up with one name, sometimes even two or three, but rarely more than that. And often these are people who have graduate degrees, so they’ve have a lot of teachers to choose from. In my case, three teachers stand out from the time I started Kindergarten in 1943 until the time I finished graduate school in 1967

Not that I didn’t have more than three good, competent teachers along the way. But, the kind of teacher I am referring to are the ones whom you remember after you have forgotten all they taught you. Who inspired you, gave you confidence, saw qualities in you that you never saw in yourself, and who changed the course of your life.

Having taught high school myself and seeing the impact she has had, I have no hesitancy in asserting that my wife Brigitte is one of those teachers. She is retiring at the end of the school year after 38 years in Fairfax County Virginia, the last 36 at Langley High School in McLean, VA. She has taught English and virtually every History course imaginable, in both the regular and A.P. curricula.

The list of her teaching-related accomplishments is long. Among others, she’s had summer fellowships at Georgetown and Harvard, spent two weeks in the former Soviet Union as part of a program sponsored by the University of Richmond, participated in a group Fulbright program that took her to China and Tibet. And, she was named Fairfax County Teacher of the Year for 2009-2010.

Impressive, sure, but what has made her truly special is the lasting impact she has had on literally hundreds and hundreds of students for almost four decades. If we had kept all the cards and letters she has received over the years from former students they would fill up several drawers. Not just testimonials from graduating students flush with the joy of just finishing high school or her class, but from students who graduated years, even decades, ago.

Two years ago, a former Langley student from the early 1980s, and now a businessman from Minneapolis, returned to the McLean area for a Langley High School reunion. As he and his former classmates sat around talking about their high school days, the name of Mrs. Lavey came up time and time again as their favorite teacher, he said, and the one who made the most difference in their lives. He delayed his return to Minneapolis to stop by Langley to tell Brigitte that.

A former Langley principal wrote recently that “Brigitte was the single best teacher I saw in action during my years in education.” His career included forty years in public education, 25 years as a high school principal in five different communities, twenty years as the chair of committees that accredited high schools for the New England Association of Schools and Colleges in the US and Europe, and six years at the Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education planning and implementing professional development institutes for practitioners.

When Brigitte told her current principal that she was retiring, but assuring him that someone else would quickly fill her shoes, he said, “Brigitte, please. Michael Jordans come along very rarely in life”

She’s going to be a tough act to follow indeed. And, now out of self-preservation, my challenge is to help her channel all that dedication and passion and energy into meaningful activities in retirement. Otherwise, we’ll both go crazy. She has a wide range of personal interests, including art, photography, and writing, along with teaching, so it’s a matter of finding the right fit.

Wish me luck.

Gerald E. Lavey