Annotations for Professional Life: Teachers

Very early, yes. And I was lucky in a way, aside from the misfortune of my talk of suicide, in that I had teachers who told me I was going to be a poet from the fourth grade on.

Well, teachers are important.

I have written about my fourth grade teacher who assigned a composition on the father of our country. And I worked very hard at it. And the next day, after turning it in, she appeared in class and she was glowing and she had one of the composition papers in her hand, and she said, "I'm going to read you something, starkly. It's like a poem." And she read my piece. And, and--the first sentence of which was, "George Washington was a tall, petite, handsome man."

Have then you felt in your life that it's necessary to pass on such encouragement to others?

And then I had a succession of teachers who told me that through the years, even in college.