It’s that time again! Children and parents all over the country are stuffing pencils and notebooks into new backpacks, checking schedules, and resetting their alarms for the first day of school.

Many kids are going through all these motions with a pit of dread in their stomachs. Others, though, are giddy with excitement. Those are the kids who’ve had a teacher like Mrs. Tilscher—an instructor who knows that to provide children with a good education is to foster wonder and facilitate discovery; who understands that the key to being a great teacher isn’t the amount of knowledge or skills you transfer to them but the degree to which you love and respect them.

May we all have a Mrs. Tilscher in our lives.

In Mrs Tilscher’s Class

by Carol Ann Duffy

In Mrs Tilscher's class
You could travel up the Blue Nile
with your finger, tracing the route
while Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery.
”Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswan.”
That for an hour,
then a skittle of milk
and the chalky Pyramids rubbed into dust.
A window opened with a long pole.
The laugh of a bell swung by a running child.

This was better than home. Enthralling books.
The classroom glowed like a sweetshop.
Sugar paper. Coloured shapes. Brady and Hindley
faded, like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake.
Mrs Tilscher loved you. Some mornings, you found
she'd left a gold star by your name.
The scent of a pencil slowly, carefully, shaved.
A xylophone's nonsense heard from another form.

Over the Easter term the inky tadpoles changed
from commas into exclamation marks. Three frogs
hopped in the playground, freed by a dunce
followed by a line of kids, jumping and croaking
away from the lunch queue. A rough boy
told you how you were born. You kicked him, but stared
at your parents, appalled, when you got back
home

That feverish July, the air tasted of electricity.
A tangible alarm made you always untidy, hot,
fractious under the heavy, sexy sky. You asked her
how you were born and Mrs Tilscher smiled
then turned away. Reports were handed out.
You ran through the gates, impatient to be grown
the sky split open into a thunderstorm.