Why We Remember Some Teachers and Forget Others: What Neuroscience Says About Emotion and Learning
Last month I was grabbing oat milk and honey cereal at my neighborhood grocery store when a woman tapped my shoulder. It was Lila, who I’d sat next to in 10th grade biology, here picking up goldfish crackers for her 7-year-old’s soccer game. My cart had a loose left wheel that kept drifting into the pasta aisle as we caught up, and eventually we started naming the teachers we’d had. We both immediately remembered Mr. Henderson, our bio teacher. We both drew a blank on the pre-calculus teacher we shared the next year. We stood there for three minutes throwing out guesses, and never got it right.
I still remember the day I spilled a full beaker of formaldehyde all over my lab table in Mr. Henderson’s class. I’d leaned over to pin my frog down, knocked the beaker, and the smell hit the whole room immediately. I went bright red, my eyes burned, and I just stood there waiting to get yelled at. Mr. Henderson came over, leaned down, and started mopping it up with paper towels. He told me he’d spilled an entire tray of formaldehyde on his first week of student teaching, and had to spend an hour scraping soaked paper towels off the floor. By the time we cleaned it up, the whole lab table was laughing, and we ended up finishing our dissection 10 minutes late with a borrowed frog. I can still name the three chambers of a frog’s heart today, 18 years later. The pre-calc teacher was fine, as I remember. He showed up on time, wrote clear notes on the board, graded our tests fairly. I just can’t remember anything he taught me, or even what he looked like, really.
Lately, I’ve been going down a rabbit hole of neuroscience papers about learning, because I volunteer in my 8-year-old son Leo’s classroom once a week, and I’ve been curious why some lessons stick and others just bounce right off. What I’ve found lines up exactly with that grocery store conversation. Our brains don’t store information like a computer saves files. The amygdala, the part of the brain that handles emotion, decides what gets sorted into long-term memory and what gets tossed. If an experience has even a small emotional tag—embarrassment, amusement, connection, even frustration—it gets marked as important, and we hold onto it. If it’s neutral, just facts on a page or a lecture with no personal hook, it doesn’t get prioritized for storage.
Last year, Leo struggled a lot with reading. He hates being wrong, so he’d shut down mid-sentence if he messed up a word, and would just sit there staring at the page until the timer ran out. We tried an after-school tutor first, a college student who was great on paper, she got straight A’s in education classes and worked through a structured curriculum with him every week. After two months, he barely improved, and last week when I asked him what his tutor’s name was, he shrugged and said “I don’t know, the nice college lady?” Then his first grade teacher, Ms. Rao, adjusted her approach with him. One day, she was reading a chapter book out loud to the class, and she tripped over the word “chrysanthemum” three times in a row. Then she laughed, said she’d been reading wrong for 30 years and no one had ever called her out on it, and did a little silly spin to make the kids laugh. She started a rule: anyone who messed up a word got to do a quick silly dance before trying again. The first time Leo messed up “caterpillar”, he did the floss dance, and the whole class clapped. Three months later, he’s reading three chapter books a week on his own. He still talks about the silly dance rule every time we sit down to read.
This isn’t about being the “fun” teacher or parent, or turning every lesson into a game. That’s not what the neuroscience says, anyway. It’s about understanding that emotion isn’t a distraction from learning—it’s part of how learning works. And there are small, low-effort things to build that little emotional tag into everyday learning, no big planning required. If you’re drilling multiplication facts with your kid, tie the problem to something they care about: “If you have five Pokémon cards and you trade two for three new ones, how many do you have total?” instead of using random numbers on a flashcard. If your kid is nervous about giving a presentation, instead of saying “don’t be nervous,” tell them about the time you forgot your entire speech at a work meeting and had to wing it for 10 minutes. That small, shared human moment creates the tag that helps the information stick. It doesn’t have to be big, it just has to be human.
I’ve started testing this out when I help Leo with his homework. Last week, he was memorizing state capitals for a quiz, and I was just about to rattle off flashcards when I remembered that story about Mr. Henderson and the formaldehyde. I put the cards down and said, “First one: what’s the capital of Oregon? Grandma lives there, we need to remember it to mail her birthday card next week.” He got it right on the first try, then joked that we should mail her some of my burned chocolate chip cookies like the ones I messed up last weekend.
I still don’t remember that pre-calc teacher’s name. I don’t think that makes him a bad person, or even a bad teacher. It just means he never got that emotional tag from me, that little moment of human connection that makes the information stick. Some days I’m in a rush with Leo’s homework, and I just drill the facts anyway, and I forget all this. It’s not a rule you have to follow perfectly every time. It’s just a good thing to keep in mind, when you’re wondering why some lessons stick and others don’t.
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