Sue Charlton helped save my life when she was my English teacher. At home, my father was abusive and told me that I was a moron, terrible person, and no one would ever care about what I did. So, Mrs. Charlton changed my life when she pulled me aside one day after class.
“You’re an intensely gifted writer, you know that, right?” She said.
I’ll never forget it. It changed everything.
For the next three years, Mrs. Charlton gave me a level of encouragement and creative nourishment that I received nowhere else. She said she thought students might one day read my writing in class. (My writing is now taught in several college courses, and I was recently interviewed for a forthcoming academic paper.) She told me I should apply for the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. (I didn’t because I was afraid of the Unknown. But she was right—I should have.) She lent me poetry books, while I recommended the movie “Wit” to her, which focuses on the Holy Sonnets of John Donne. (“Death, be not proud…”)
Teaching is a profound act of servanthood. Mrs. Charlton was a very gifted poet herself. I still remember a gorgeous line from a poem she wrote when she was pregnant about the baby “dreaming against [her] backbone.” Yet Mrs. Charlton chose to pour many of her gifts into her students, aware that one cannot predict or control where they’ll go.
I’ve now taught reading and writing to students from ages 5 to 85. Mrs. Charlton’s example is always with me. How can I lift up the people I’m teaching and surrender to the uncertainty, joy, and potential disappointment that sacrifice entails? What gifts will it bring to them and to me?
I’ll never forget Mrs. Charlton elegantly carrying around her mug in class, or her laughing with Linda, Christine , and Joshua in the hallway when he was a toddler, or how graciously she responded when she invited our AP English class over to her home to watch “Hamlet” and we spilled like, Pepsi or something, on one of her lovely rugs, or her love for Gerard Manley Hopkins. I hope she’s drinking tea from a large mug with Gerard and John Donne right now.
