It was William Bulter Yeats (pictured) who said, "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." After 35 years, Professor David McGrath shares with readers the fires he's lit and the lessons he's learned about teaching and students.

OPINION - James was one of the good kids. Tall and shy, he made an effort to look at adults directly while speaking. He was interested in other students, had bright eyes, and always appeared to be on the verge of laughter.

Although a Chicago high school senior, he was in my junior English class, since he had been originally tracked in “essential” level classes for students two or more years below grade level.

One Friday afternoon, he hung around after class to ask a question: “What are your seniors doing in English?”

After I told him, James asked if in his spare time, he could also learn to write the 2,500 word research paper just like his peers in regular English.

“Sure,” I said. “Ask your counselor if she can get you a tutor. I can lend you a book.”

That was many years ago, when my wife and I had a two year old, another on the way, and I had 139 other students to worry about. I didn’t think twice about casting James adrift on his own.

This year I retire. After 35 years of teaching in high school and college, I have some regrets. Many mistakes I made cause me to question whether I helped or hindered hundreds of students.

How many others like James were discouraged because my personal business took precedence over their needs?

How many voices did I stifle, because it was more important to manage classrooms, regulate behavior, and appear in control?

Eventually, experience made me “smarter” or, at least, less a liability to my pupils. And the one true thing I learned and can pass on about teaching, it’s that you need to listen. It’s not easy. Behavioral problems, mammoth classes, parental and societal pressures, school bureaucracy-everything makes you want to direct communication one way: to tell, to command, to advise, to discipline.

But the key is to get comfortable being a listener: to learn, to see, to ask, and to be frank and sincere throughout. Once you have that disposition, you need no gizmos or teaching tricks, for all students possess a hunger for learning that you need only tap into.

So my memories are names and faces. They’re the human beings I got to know but did not always help.

Such as Cecelia, a sophomore, who wrote brilliant essays that I read to the entire class, but who dropped out of school after giving birth to a baby girl.

Gina and Paul, tops on our debate team, who earned an upset tie against a big suburban school, but whose parents would not allow them to attend college for religious reasons.

Aaron, whom I had to threaten before he’d read Shakespeare, who later, for extra credit, memorized Hamlet’s monologues, because the plays “were just like the soaps.”

Luis who struggled in College English 101. The other students liked him and helped him with his essays, after which he bought everyone in class a brightly wrapped Christmas gift from Mexico. I know he felt betrayed when I could not pass him into 102, and I haven’t seen him since.

Nick, who suffers from depression, has a continuous headache from medication, who can’t keep a job and can only concentrate on one class per semester, but who has been driving to school every week for the last ten years, because he still plans to make something of his life.

Georgia, anxious about returning to college among younger students, yet for whom those same classmates cheered when her essay assignment about Mother’s Day appeared in the newspaper.

Phil, the diver and ship salvager; Pete, retiree and aspiring novelist; Naomi the cartographer; Sam the fly-fishing instructor; Joe the cop; Monique the insurance agent; Nate the harmonica player; and hundreds of others who shared their stories, their lives, and gave me far more than I might have given them.

And, finally, Andy, the paramedic in my night class in short fiction, who was often late, distracted, and his homework incomplete, but who one night raised his hand to explain the hero’s anguish about his delinquent brother in James Baldwin’s story “Sonny’s Blues” as no one else could, giving everyone goose bumps and tears and renewed understanding of why we were all in school.

As I stand in front of my last classes and say my farewells, I have doubts about what I’ve done. Doubts about impact. Doubts over whether or not they might have been better off with someone else.

Of one thing there is no doubt: there is nothing else in the world I would rather have done; nothing else I would rather have been, than a teacher.

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David McGrath is a freelance writer and Professor of English at College of DuPage. He is author of the novel Siege at Ojibwa.

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