Reading this? Thank a teacher…

Somehow, through all the thick and thin of last week’s violence and bad weather, I let National Teacher Appreciation Week slip past me.

Shame on me.

Our teachers are among the most important people in our lives and deserve every ounce of recognition they can get.

They are the reasons that you can read these words – and why I’m able to write ‘em.

And what is a sad fact is that they’re among the lowest-paid true public servants anywhere.

Here in North Carolina, teachers are having to either work multiple jobs or leave the schools and go to the private sector in order to be able to make ends meet for themselves and their families. That should be unacceptable to all of us.

I would guess that most of you have favorite teachers.

My list of favorites actually started in the first grade, when Miss Winecoff would read to her tiny charges at Park Road Elementary School and encourage them to broaden their horizons, often picking someone from the class to read the latest Dr. Seuss or some similarly entertaining book aloud.

She helped us overcome shyness, while at the same time taught us the pure lyrical beauty of the written word.

Another one for me was Mrs. Finley, my fourth-grade teacher who frequently showed us those National Geographic films in class, inspiring the adventurer in all of us, and Mrs. West in the fifth grade, who had the most beautiful handwriting I’d ever seen and who stressed the importance of being able to write legibly.

In the seventh grade, the gorgeous Miss DeArmon fanned our individual dramatic flames, teaching us the words of the poets and the craft of playwrights and historians.

It was in her class that my own personal ‘drama spark’ ignited and I wrote my first piece of fiction, a sort of hybrid ‘Godzilla meets King Kong’ action yarn that my math teacher, Mr. Hickman, promptly removed from my grasp when he caught me editing it in his classroom. Never saw it again, but the seed had been planted.

Then there was my high school English teacher, Mrs. Johnson, who was thrilled when I chose as my ‘big project’ to rewrite the last act of “Hamlet,” adhering to Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter through and through but giving it a happy ending that I’m sure made the Bard’s ghost tremble.

Thanks to all those wonderful people from my childhood, I’ll always have some tale to tell.

And we need to make sure our own children, their children and generations to come will have that same motivation.

“In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers,” automotive innovator Lee Iacocca once said. “The rest of us would have to settle for something else.”

Let’s all pledge right now and forevermore to go to bat for those teachers.

We need to make sure our legislators understand their importance and join forces to keep good teachers in every single one our classrooms.

They most certainly deserve it and, of course, we do, too.