Putnam Books

With the end of the school year approaching, we’ve been thinking about the teachers who had the biggest impact on us. We love this video and piece by Taylor Mali, taken from WHAT TEACHERS MAKE:

If having even just one truly exceptional teacher in your life makes you lucky—and I think it does—then my life has been an absurd embarrassment of riches. Kate Millonzi was my fourth-grade teacher at the Collegiate School for Boys in New York City. That was her first year at the school, but I think she had taught for a few years at another school before coming to Collegiate. Kate read out loud to the class at least once a day, all of us sitting at her feet in ever-widening concentric semicircles. I remember a story she read to us about the Buddha and how he was thirty years old before he ever witnessed human suffering. She put the book down for a moment and looked up and said, “He was my age before he’d ever witnessed suffering. Imagine that.“ Unfortunately, none of us found that as interesting as the fact that she had inadvertently told us how old she was. "You’re thirty!?” Kate Millonzi made a difference for me because she loved me, and I would do anything in order to avoid the look of disappointment that occluded her face when I didn’t do well. If that meant working harder and behaving better, so be it. Mrs. Millonzi, you made a difference in my life.

Publisher’s Weekly calls WHAT TEACHERS MAKE “straightforward, fast-paced, and trenchant. … [An] evocative, small book bulging with a big idea—“to remind teachers that they are dearly loved.” You can now find it at your favorite retailer!