By Justin Parmenter, English Teacher in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools
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Teacher Appreciation Week is here, and while every educator will gladly accept a fresh cup of coffee or a much-needed box of Kleenex for their classroom, there is a gift that carries far more weight. The most profound way to honor a teacher is to tell them specifically how they changed the trajectory of your life. It is the kind of message that stays pinned to a corkboard or tucked into a desk drawer for decades, because it directly answers the question every teacher asks themselves from time to time: “Is what I’m doing even making a difference?”
When I reflect on all the teachers I have had throughout the course of my life, there is one whose impact still resonates with me today.
As a high schooler, I was the student you’d find in the very last row—the one who stayed quiet, not out of shyness, but out of a persistent, simmering skepticism. I wasn’t a “bad kid,” but I was a reluctant one. I spent a lot of my energy questioning the relevance of everything we did. I looked at formulas on the board and was convinced there was no practical use on the planet for algebra. To me, school often felt like a series of hoops to jump through rather than a place for actual growth.
Then I walked into Ms. Beasley’s 11th-grade American Literature class.
Cynthia Beasley didn’t need to raise her voice to command the room. She had a quiet, steady presence and an authority on her subject matter that made it clear she believed that what we were reading actually mattered. She wasn’t just checking off a curriculum. She was showing us that literature could be deeply meaningful and that the ideas it contained could be used as tools for navigating our own lives.
When she introduced me and my classmates to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance, something finally clicked. For a student who felt like just another face in the crowd, Emerson’s insistence on nonconformity and trusting one’s own mind felt practical and necessary. Then came Thoreau. Reading about his life at Walden Pond, the intentionality and the rejection of a life of “quiet desperation,” gave me a way to understand the restlessness I had been feeling. For the first time, I wasn’t just “doing school.” I was considering how to build a life path that was unconventional but deeply rewarding.
The shift in my perspective was gradual but real. Once Ms. Beasley helped me see that my own thoughts had value and that learning was a tool for self-determination, my attitude toward school changed. I became more open-minded toward other subjects. I realized that even the classes I struggled with were parts of a larger puzzle. I stopped sitting in the back row mentally and started to focus.
Today, when I stand at the front of my own classroom, I often see my younger self staring back at me from the back row. I see the student who is silently asking, “Why does this matter?” Because of Ms. Beasley, my teaching philosophy is rooted in practical impact. I try to design every lesson through the eyes of that skeptical student, asking how the concept connects to their world and how I can make it engaging enough to be worth their time.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain this focus. We live in an era where standardized testing drives so many instructional decisions from the top down. The pressure to “teach to the test” is a constant weight, threatening to turn the classroom back into the rigid, factory-line experience I once detested.
But I remember Ms. Beasley. I remember that the most important things she taught me couldn’t be captured by a bubble sheet. She taught me to think, to question, and to walk my own path.
To Ms. Beasley, and to every teacher who sees the reluctant student in the back and gives them a reason to care: thank you. You aren’t just teaching a subject. You are helping us find our way.
This week, don’t just send the gift card. Find that one teacher who saw something in you that you hadn’t yet seen in yourself. Send the email. Write the note. Tell them exactly what they did that made a difference. I promise you, it is one gift teachers never get tired of receiving.
Justin Parmenter is a North Carolina English teacher and creator of the blog Notes from the Chalkboard.