Rarely do teachers know whether they make lasting impressions on students and finding out they did can be one of the most profound rewards of all. I know because it happened to my mother, a retired teacher when she turned on NPR one morning. I was visiting my parents in 2003 when my mom came out of their room with a puzzled look on her face. She’d been listening to the radio and heard an interview with a bestselling author of young-adult fantasy novels. The woman’s name was Tamora Pierce, the same as a precocious young writer my mom had taught nearly four decades before. Well, I said (probably far too snarkily), the Internet should be able to tell us. I found the author’s website quickly. She was a big deal—an “enormously popular” writer, as a New York Times review, put it, of books featuring powerful heroines. I clicked on the biography link to scan for references to Burlingame Junior High, where my mom had worked, and my heart began to flutter when I spotted it at the bottom of the first section. Here was confirmation that my mother had taught a now-famous writer! But my eyes came to a standstill reading the next paragraph, in which Pierce described writing her first fiction as a sixth grader.
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