This week, as schools close for the summer, students have been saying goodbye to teachers. And teachers have been bidding farewell to students — some for the last time, as they prepare to retire.
Brian McNamara went through all that in 2006, when he closed a three-decade career teaching fifth- and sixth-graders at Wildwood Elementary School in Amherst. He was barely past 60 and still enthusiastic about teaching. He says he took up tutoring privately to get his “kid fix.”
This Saturday, Mr. Mac, as legions of students have known him, will get the biggest “kid fix” he’s seen in a decade. A reunion of his former classes is planned at 4 p.m. that day at Rafter’s Sports Bar & Restaurant.
Don’t worry, most of Mr. Mac’s former students are over 21 by now.
It is being convened because McNamara, 71, is battling a cancer diagnosis. For organizers like Cinda Jones, the gathering offers her and all former students a chance to show once again, through comments or their simple presence, how much they learned from McNamara.
And how much they still value what he did for them.
Though Saturday’s event honors him specifically, all teachers should be pleased to see how durable teacher-student relationships can be.
Jones credits McNamara with helping her, as a child, understand who she is and what she values. She says she’s been telling him that for years. It probably never gets old for McNamara. Former student Liz Doran, who is 28 and works as a school counselor near Boston, says she discovered her potential in McNamara’s classroom. In her time with him, she built her confidence.
And 10 years before that, Sara Ewell, now 37, was there every day in Mr. Mac’s classroom, soaking up not only information, but this educator’s example of living an open, honest life. Ewell became a teacher herself, and explained why to Gazette reporter Scott Merzbach: “The passion and love he brought to the classroom was amazing. When I entered my own classroom as a teacher, I often thought back to lessons Mac taught and tried to mimic them.”
Constance Chen, 47, says she learned in Mr. Mac’s classroom how to prepare to function as a citizen in society. “There was a magic about Mac that touched every kid that was lucky enough to be in his class,” Chen recalled.
Such testimony will be buzzing through the room Saturday. For his part, McNamara calls the party that Jones has prepared a “dream come true for me.”
What accounts for the show of admiration? It takes a teacher who truly feels called to this work. Someone with the gift of bringing real life, and real issues, into the classroom, whatever the age of students. Someone who respects students, as McNamara so clearly did, and who knows that he or she will in turn learn a great deal from the little people at the desks.
At Wildwood, students came to see McNamara as a real person, not just an authority figure. He seemed to be someone who saw them as real people, too. “I told the kids I would be their friend for life, if you choose to be,” McNamara said in an interview. “I appreciated teaching as a situation where you built relationships with the students.
When Facebook came along, McNamara and his former students found a way to rekindle those relationships. Of the 400 or so friends he has on Facebook, 350 of them are former students.
McNamara may share updates on his medical condition. He endured a nine-hour surgery last year related to urethral cancer, underwent three months of chemotherapy in the fall and has been considering participating in a clinical trial at Massachusetts General Hospital.
His openness about all this seems characteristic of him, given what students say about him. It takes courage to teach, and now to fight cancer.
Too often, we gather to speak of the important people in our lives only after they can no longer listen in.
This week offers a rare chance to do what writer E.M. Forster once had a character exalt in a sermon with just two words: “Only connect.”