they like me! they really like me!

Was talking to my mother last night. She teaches in the Language and Literature department at RIT, so it's not unusual for us to have some of the same students--sometimes at the same time, but more often during different quarters.

She used to teach at a local community college, where she once had a student who'd left RIT after his teachers had apparently failed to recognize his skills and talents. In the compare-and-contrast essay that her students wrote that semester, this person compared the worst teacher he'd ever had with the best. The best, of course, was my mother. The worst...well, while the person wasn't named, my mother realized after reading it, and discussing it with the student, that it was me. (My mother and I don't share a last name, nor are we similar in appearance, so he'd have had no way of knowing about the connection.)

In a remarkable display of professional ethics, my mother never told me who the student was, and never told the student who I was. But the incident stuck with us both, and we now regularly tell the story to our students at the beginning of a quarter, so that none of them unwittingly make the same mistake.

At any rate, I was talking to her last night, and she mentioned that she had a student this quarter who'd had me for a class last year. And that when the student found out about the relationship, she stopped my mother after class to talk about how much she'd loved my class. In fact, my mother said, the student said that it was the best class she'd taken here at RIT.

I know, I know, this is a shameless, self-promoting, boastful post. But I've posted a lot lately about things that that I'm not happy about...seemed like it made sense to share something that made me happy.