For the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a proposal that has required me to do some research and basically reacquaint myself with a subject that I haven’t studied in about fifteen years.

(Was the information in that paragraph vague enough for you? Good! More vaguery to come!)

And last week, when I started to worry that I was missing huge, critical chunks of information, I thought about one of my college professors who is an expert in the field I’ve been researching. In a fit of spontanaiety, I decided to email her. Because technology, it is oftentimes quite handy.

So I emailed my former professor, Dr. H, and told her what I was working on. I asked her for some input, thanked her for pouring into the life of a crazy college student (THAT WOULD BE ME) way back in the day and basically gave her a summary of what I’ve been up to since the last time we talked.

Including my most recent hobby of RANDOMLY DROPPING BACK INTO FORMER PROFESSORS’ LIVES VIA EMAIL.

Not to mention my ongoing hobby of making former professors twitch when they see the excessive use of sentence fragments on my blog.

A few days later I found a very gracious reply from Dr. H in my inbox, and I was a little surprised by how thrilled I was to hear from her. Dr. H was one of my favorite teachers because she not only knew her stuff – she also knew how to communicate information in a way that made it easy to remember. I took five different courses from her in undergraduate and graduate school, and I really did learn in each one of them.

Dr. H also had a huge impact on my writing, especially when I was a freshman and she very kindly pointed out my tendency to end pretty much every other sentence with “etc.”

For example: “Southern architecture also serves as symbolism in the works of Welty, Faulkner, etc.”

Or: “Plath’s poem Daddy features a narrator with a deep well of bitterness toward an absent father she perceives be cold, cruel, etc.”

If memory serves, the overuse of “etc.” was my eighteen year-old way of trying to cover up for the fact that I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. So I just held onto the hope that maybe if I tacked an “etc.” on the end of my sentences, my professors WOULD NEVER CATCH ON TO THE FACT THAT I HAD NO MORE INFORMATION TO SHARE.

Oh, I was very crafty.

(Now is when I could tell you about the time I played the role of bathrobe-wearing, chain-smoking Martha in Who’s Afraid of Viriginia Woolf for Dr. H’s Modern Drama class – and for my costume I opted to wear a plaid skirt with a matching sweater and THERE WAS EVEN PLAID ON THE SWEATER, Y’ALL because obviously I was all about KEEPIN’ IT REAL with my ACT-ING.)

(But I won’t be telling you about any of that because it would be far too embarrassing.)

As it turns out, Dr. H is retiring this spring. And as she looks back on her career and reflects on her legacy, I hope she knows what a difference she made in the life of a wide-eyed sorority girl who sported some mighty large acrylic hairbows back in the early 1990’s. There’s no question that I was just a middle-of-the-pack student – albeit one with some misguided delusions of intelligence – but Dr. H made me better. She really and truly cared about making her students better.

Thanks for everything, Dr. H.

And I wonder: are there teachers who had – or who continue to have – a major influence in your life?

Tell me all about ’em. Because I’m feeling sort of nostalgic.

(I may even break out a hair bow.)

(But I draw the line at wearing any sort of matching plaid ensemble.)

Congratulations, Fresh Girl! Ye Olde Random.org has selected you as our $25 gift card winner!

If you’ll email me your mailing address, you should have the gift card in time for a lovely Friday night dinner.

And thanks, everyone, for such a great response!