Why we remember some teachers and forget others: what neuroscience says about emotion and learning
I was standing in the back of my daughter’s 8th grade biology classroom last month, leaning against a lab counter stacked with half-dissected starfish and a cloudy jar of formaldehyde, holding a lukewarm PTA lemonade in a crumpled paper cup, when the teacher asked me if I’d had any memorable science teachers growing up.
I didn’t even hesitate. I thought of Mr. Carter, my 10th grade biology teacher. I couldn’t recite the Krebs cycle if you paid me, but I can still feel the scratch of his wool sweater when he leaned over my lab table, still taste the spearmint of the extra mint he pulled out of his crumpled jacket pocket for me after I cried over nicking the frog’s heart before I was supposed to. I remember he told me he still messed up practice dissections before every semester. He didn’t rush me to get a new frog or tell me to stop overreacting. He just sat with me, wiped my scissors off, and walked through the steps again.
Then the teacher asked me about my other 10th grade classes. I took AP US History that same year, got an A in the class, aced the AP exam, and even used the credit to graduate college early. I stared at her for a full 10 seconds and couldn’t remember the teacher’s name. Couldn’t picture her face, couldn’t remember a single lesson or conversation we ever had. That’s when I realized how true this whole thing about emotion and learning really is.
A few weeks before that back to school night, I’d read a breakdown of recent neuroscience work on memory and learning that explained why that gap exists. For a long time, most of us treated emotion like a distraction from learning—something you leave at the classroom door, something that gets in the way of focusing on facts and formulas. But it turns out emotion isn’t separate from learning. It’s the glue that holds learning in place.
The amygdala, the part of the brain that processes how we feel, works directly with the hippocampus, the part that stores long-term memory. Any experience that has even a mild emotional charge gets tagged as “important” by the amygdala, so your brain holds onto it. Experiences with no emotional connection get sorted into the “can dump this after the test” pile, and that’s exactly what happens. That’s why I can’t remember a single thing from that AP US History class: all the lessons were worksheets, lectures, and memorization for tests, no emotional weight to any of it. My brain just tossed it after the exam.
This isn’t just a thing that happens to adults looking back. I see it with my daughter Lila right now. She came home the third week of school this year complaining about her math teacher, Ms. Lopez, because Ms. Lopez starts every class with 5 minutes of people sharing wrong answers they got on their homework the night before. I was initially annoyed—why would you force kids to share mistakes in front of everyone? But after a week, Lila came home laughing about how she messed up the entire set of quadratic formula problems, and Ms. Lopez had said, “That’s such a common mix-up between the plus and minus signs— I do that when I’m tired too.” Lila said she didn’t even feel embarrassed. Now she can rattle off the quadratic formula without hesitating, and she told me it’s because she’ll never forget that moment she messed it up in front of the whole class.
Contrast that with her 6th grade math teacher, who called on kids who didn’t raise their hand and shamed them for wrong answers to “keep everyone on their toes.” Lila got a B that year, but she couldn’t explain basic algebra to me at the end of it, and all she remembers is how she’d sit in class staring at her desk hoping she wouldn’t get called on. The emotion there was strong, but it was toxic shame, so her brain locked down instead of holding onto the lesson. That’s the key difference: it’s not just any emotion, it’s safe emotion that helps memory stick.
The best part about this, for teachers and parents, is it doesn’t require big, fancy changes or extra time. It’s just small, specific shifts that create those mild emotional connections. I’ve started doing this at home when we do homework. Instead of opening her notebook and jumping straight to correcting wrong answers, I first ask, “What part of this made you frustrated while you were working on it?” It takes 30 extra seconds, and more often than not she’ll say something like, “I got three wrong in a row and I wanted to crumple the paper up.” I just say, “That sounds really frustrating” before we start working through the problems. She remembers the concepts we go over way better now than she used to when I skipped that step.
For teachers, it can be as small as pausing to acknowledge how a kid feels before moving on to the lesson. If someone cries over a bad quiz grade, don’t just hand them a new study guide and tell them to do better next time. Pause for 10 seconds, say “That grade stings, I get it” before you talk about how to improve. If a kid is excited about a soccer game they played over the weekend, ask them how it went before you start the math lesson. It doesn’t take away from learning time—it gives the brain a reason to hold onto the learning that comes after.
I saw Mr. Carter at a 10 year high school reunion a few years back, and I reminded him of that frog dissection story. He shrugged and said he remembered that week—half the frogs in the supply batch were damaged and hard to cut, so half the class cried. It wasn’t a big moment for him, but it was a big moment for me, and that’s all it takes. One small, safe emotional interaction to tag the whole experience as something worth keeping.
Last week, Lila came home from her biology field trip with a pressed dandelion she collected, and a story about how her teacher stopped the whole group to listen when she pointed out that half the dandelions on the hill were already going to seed, even though it was only early September. Twenty years from now, she’ll probably forget the parts of a flower she learned this unit, but I bet she’ll remember that teacher. I still don’t remember the name of that AP US History teacher I got an A from, and I don’t think that’s a failure on anyone’s part. It’s just how our brains work. Some moments stick, and some don’t, and the difference almost always comes down to how we felt in them.
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