What Makes A Great Teacher: Lessons From The One Who Changed My Son’s School Experience
I sat on a tiny molded plastic chair outside Ms. Lopez’s 4th grade classroom last November, the knee of my jeans sticking to the sticky linoleum, while Jax slouched into my side and tapped aimlessly at my old phone. We’d been through enough of these conferences to know the script: Jax is easily distracted, he doesn’t turn in homework, he’s two grade levels behind in reading, we’re doing everything we can but you need to work with him at home. Jax had gotten so used to it that he didn’t even bother to look up when a teacher talked about him like he wasn’t in the room. I’d already scheduled a consultation with a homeschool tutor for the next week, because I couldn’t watch him hate school every single day anymore.
Ms. Lopez opened the door, a coffee stain blotted on the front of her knit sweater, and she was holding a crumpled blue notebook. She didn’t lead us to the table stacked with test printouts first. She opened that notebook and turned it toward us. “Did you know Jax can tell you the exact difference between a T-Rex and a Giganotosaurus?” she said. “He drew all these, labeled every bone. I had him talk about them with the class last week, and half the kids were crowding his desk after to ask more questions.”
I looked at Jax, and for the first time in two years of parent-teacher conferences, he lifted his head off my shoulder. His cheeks were pink, but he was smiling, just a little. I had no idea he’d talked in front of the class. He never mentioned anything that happened at school anymore, not after years of being called out for reading slow or getting in trouble for drawing in class.
Jax is dyslexic. We got his diagnosis in second grade, got all the official accommodations, an IEP, everything people tell you to do. But what that looked like in practice was him getting pulled out of class for 30 minutes a day to do boring phonics worksheets, coming home red-faced and saying he was stupid. His second grade teacher sent home a note saying he “refused to apply himself” because he’d rather draw than do his reading homework. By the start of 4th grade, he was faking stomach aches at least once a week to stay home. I got it. If every time I went to a place where all anyone told me was everything I was doing wrong, I’d want to stay home too.
Ms. Lopez sat down with us and pulled out his test scores eventually, but she didn’t lead with them. She said she’d noticed after the first month that Jax only acted out when he was asked to read out loud from the grade-level textbook, or write a five-paragraph essay about a topic he didn’t care about. When she let him work on his dinosaurs, he stayed focused for 45 minutes straight, longer than most kids in the class. So she adjusted the rules for him. He could keep his sketchbook on his desk, and draw while she did whole group reading, because he listened better that way. Instead of the weekly 20-minute reading assignment from the assigned anthology, he could read 10 minutes of whatever dinosaur book he wanted, then draw a picture of what he learned to turn in. Instead of presenting his book report in front of the whole class, he could just present it to her at recess, or to a small group of three friends if he wanted.
That’s when I started realizing that all the generic stuff people say about great teachers is mostly wrong. You don’t need to be born with some special gift, or have extra training, or a bigger classroom budget to be that teacher. Ms. Lopez had 28 kids in her class, the same underfunded classroom, the same state testing requirements every other teacher at our school deals with. She didn’t do anything fancy or expensive. She just paid attention to what Jax actually needed, instead of checking boxes on a form.
After that conference, I started talking to other parents, and almost everyone has that one teacher. The one that didn’t treat your kid like a list of scores or behaviors, that saw the actual kid. What I’ve noticed is that all of those teachers do the same small, specific things that anyone can copy, whether you’re a teacher or a parent at home.
For example, if your kid is struggling with school work, don’t force them to do it the way the curriculum says. If they love soccer, let them practice math by adding up league scores instead of doing the worksheet. If they hate writing essays, let them record a video of their report instead. It doesn’t lower the bar, it just meets them where they are so they can actually clear it. Jax is still practicing reading, he still stumbles over big words, but he’s practicing every night because he cares about what he’s reading. That’s way more progress than he ever made forcing himself through a chapter book he didn’t care about just to get a good grade.
Another thing: stop treating small “distractions” like big problems. If your kid doodles while listening, don’t take their notebook away. If they need to stand while doing homework, let them stand. Most of the time, these little things aren’t taking away from their focus, they’re helping them focus. Before Ms. Lopez, every teacher took Jax’s sketchbook away, and that’s when he’d start poking his neighbor or crumpling up his paper, because he had nowhere to put his extra energy. Now he draws, listens, and gets his work done. It takes 10 seconds to let a kid keep their sketchbook, and it changes everything.
I also learned that you don’t have to “fix” a kid to be good for them. Ms. Lopez never talked about getting Jax caught up by the end of the year like it was the only goal that mattered. She talked about him liking school again, about him feeling like he belonged there. That’s the first step that everyone skips, right? If a kid doesn’t feel safe or welcome in the room, they won’t learn anything, no matter how good your lesson plan is.
It’s almost the end of the school year now. Jax still has bad days. Last week he faked a stomach ache after a big reading test, and we stayed home and watched dinosaur documentaries instead. He’s still a little behind his grade level in reading, and he probably will be for a while. But he wakes up most mornings and gets dressed without complaining, he talks about Ms. Lopez at dinner, he brought home a flyer for the after-school dinosaur club Ms. Lopez started for kids who like drawing and paleontology. I canceled the homeschool consultation.
I don’t know what next year will bring, when Jax gets a new teacher who may go back to checking boxes. But I have this now, this example of what actually works. When people ask what makes a great teacher, it’s not the perfect lesson plans or the highest test scores. It’s the small stuff: noticing what a kid cares about, bending the rules a little, and seeing the person instead of the label. That’s the stuff that sticks, long after the school year ends.
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