What did you learn?

An appreciation of the lessons that stuck with us.

Teachers deserve our appreciation.

That’s something that should both go without saying and be said more often, but either way, it’s true. Teaching is can be a thankless job, one that often takes more than it gives to the overworked, under-compensated people who have dedicated their professional lives to educating our nation’s youth.

I believe this fully, but I never believe it more so than after a long break.

You see, my kids just went back to school for the first time in three weeks, the product of an untimely snowstorm arriving just as the winter holiday break was set to end. I love my children dearly and cherish the time I get to spend with them, but by the end of those three weeks, our house was a hostage scenario and I was not the captor. Placing my darling children on the school bus yesterday morning was a relief for all parties involved—except, perhaps, for the dedicated and talented educators who were newly subject to being called “bro” by nine-year-olds.

It’s with this in mind that I’d like to kick off a discussion.

I’m in my early forties, which means I’ve been out of school for quite a long time now. I’ve forgotten many of the things I learned back then: I couldn’t conjugate a Spanish verb to save my life, I don’t remember what the Hundred Years’ War was about, and—if I can be real with you—I’m not sure I ever actually knew what a cotangent is.¹

There’s plenty that has stuck with me, though.

Today, I’d like to reflect on some of the most lasting lessons I took from my school days, and thank the teachers who—directly or indirectly—imparted that wisdom.

After sharing a few of mine, I’d like to hear some of the best lessons you learned from your teachers:

(Seriously, I really want to hear yours. I already know mine.)

Things are allowed to be fun

Mr. Bracken, 10th-grade Chemistry

Chemistry class has a leg up on many other subjects, admittedly—there’s more opportunities to light things on fire than in Algebra class, or at least more permissible opportunities. That said, Mr. Bracken illuminated the subject in a way that far exceeded the baseline. There were (controlled) explosions, hands-on experiments, and a “flaming Ferris wheel” demonstration involving an array of chemicals burning at different color temperatures rotating on a contraption he’d built just for fun.

What really stuck with me were the songs, though—Weird Al-esque parodies of pop hits re-written with the intent of lodging scientific concepts in sleepy sophomores’ brains. His turn on Modern English’s 1982 hit “I Melt With You” has kept the basics of heat transfer and phase change with me for nearly three decades.

I stop the ΔT and melt with you…

Don’t use the word “very” in your writing

Ms. Hines (no relation), 11th-grade English/Journalism

Ms. Hines and I had an at-times-adversarial relationship. Perhaps this was in small part because many people incorrectly assumed we were related—an association neither of us especially relished—but more to the point, it was because I was a pain in the ass. (I know, I know. You’re shocked.) I’d goof around in the back of class talking to my friends, then write essays or articles for the school newspaper at the absolutely last minute. I’d still do pretty good on them, but she was right to be annoyed by me.

It’s some form of karmic balance, then, that her admonition of the uselessness of the word “very” in one’s writing has stuck with me through many hundreds of thousands of words written as an adult, like a shock collar going off when I approach an invisible fence of uncreative hyperbole.

There’s always a better way to say what you mean. Try harder.

If you’re clever enough, you don’t have to follow the letter of the assignment

Ms. Glenn, 12th-grade AP English

Okay, well, there’s a bit of a recurring theme here—I was a smartass in high school.²

This revelation came out of an unfortunate misunderstanding of the school calendar heading into my senior year—our summer reading assignment involved reading four hefty books (The Iliad, Crime and Punishment, Catch-22 and one elective that I can’t remember) and writing a series of fifteen essays related to them. All summer long, I slacked off, assuming that they were due on the first day of school—until I checked in early August and realized I actually had five days left to do all of it.

I did do it—I genuinely read all of those books in four days—but by the time it was time to write those essays, I was exhausted and annoyed. By the fourth or fifth essay, I was writing pure sarcasm. One prompt referenced the hero’s journey, and asked us to write about someone we considered a hero; I wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay about how heroic I was.

I figured I was screwed anyways, and I might as well go down swinging.

Ms. Glenn saw what I was doing, and she appreciated it. I think I got a 98/100 on the assignment. I cannot express how much it means to a seventeen-year-old for an adult authority figure to appreciate your sense of humor. If you’ve ever taken exception with something I’ve written, she’s at least partly to blame.

Just because they’re in charge doesn’t mean they’re right

Dr. Peet, 12th-grade AP US Government

The details of the dispute are mostly lost to history—all I remember is that someone at the district level was implementing a change in how grades were calculated that my nerdiest friends and I understood could hurt us when submitting our college applications.

A few of us expressed dismay, and Dr. Peet—the kind of middle-aged teacher who in retrospect had been a rabble-rouser in his day—encouraged us to push back. They don’t know any better than you, he said in so many words, and that’s something special for a kid to hear—the realization that the adults in charge might not know what they’re doing. It mobilized us, and despite pushback from an arrogant and inaccessible superintendent, we were able to get the change reversed.

(That superintendent left the district shortly thereafter, and I’d like to take at least partial credit.)

“Chief” is a gender-neutral term

Unnamed middle-school basketball coach who also taught 6th-grade Art class

Okay, this one’s a bit of a joke, so I won’t name names.

He really did call everyone “Chief”, though—boys and girls. Sure, it was because he didn’t remember any of our names, but I’m still going to give him retroactive credit for progressivism that was almost surely not intentional at the time.

It was 1993—we’ll take what we can get.

Don’t believe it when people say things are worse than ever

Mr. Patten, 7th-grade Social Studies

Mr. Patten was an interesting character. He wore three-piece suits to teach public middle school, and (at least in my memory) looked a bit like if Hans Gruber had gotten out of the terrorism business and gotten his teaching degree. He spun fanciful stories about being an orphan and would occasionally bring in a collection of antique swords and muskets to show off.

(Again, it was the 1990s. Different time, etc.)

He was also a fabulous teacher, one who kept the objectively-worst age of students rapt at attention as he shared lessons from history, one of which has stuck with me perhaps more than anything else I learned in a classroom.

When people tell you things are worse than ever, don’t believe them.

This lesson wasn’t one of sunny optimism, nor was it the product of the mid-nineties being some utopian era (they weren’t), but rather simple historical perspective.

It’s easy to believe that things are uniquely terrible right now, he told us, but it’s not supported by the facts. Yes, there are bad people now, and they’re doing bad things; those people have been a constant throughout history. There are also good things happening now, things that people in the past couldn’t have dreamed of.

You shouldn’t ignore the former, but you also can’t take the latter for granted.

It’s a hell of a lesson, and one that’s as relevant in 2025 as it was back then.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)

What lessons have stuck with you the longest?

Getty Images / Jonathan Kirn

1. One of the funniest-to-me myths about architecture is that people seem to think we do a lot of math. We do not. First of all, you’re thinking of structural engineers. Second, they use computers.

2. To paraphrase Mitch Hedberg’s bit on “I used to do drugs”—I still am a smartass, but I was then, too.