What Mrs. Burdick taught me about teaching (even though she thought she was teaching me about writing)

Mrs. Burdick was my 10th grade English teacher. Before the start of the school year, rumors floated around that she sometimes cried during class when she got overwhelmed; this information added a certain tension to every English class, and before Christmas vacation, the rumor was confirmed. Mrs. Burdick did cry sometimes, in frustration, annoyance, and just plain tiredness, I think.
It may be surprising to hear, given that opening paragraph, that the lesson I take from Mrs. Burdick about teaching is not that teaching can be so difficult sometimes you just “lose it”; instead, Mrs. Burdick taught me that effective writing teachers give substantive feedback. They respect each student’s piece of writing so deeply that they’ll spend hours and hours outside of class reading and responding to the writing to make it better. I turned in at least three drafts of an 8-page paper about Huckleberry Finn and every draft came back to me with streams of comments. Mrs. Burdick taught me that when you take the work kids do seriously, they’re more likely to take themselves seriously and work very hard to get the learning right.