That beloved schoolbag, she went on, and its precious contents: the black-and-white Mead composition book, the loose-leaf binder with the subject dividers with the candy-colored tabs, the pens and pencils, the pencil sharpener, the eraser, the ruler and the protractor and the pencil compass—all of which made me feel so important. School, in general, made me feel loved. I can remember the feeling very clearly, she said, even if I couldn’t have put it into words. That somebody wanted to teach me things, that they cared about my penmanship, my stick-figure drawings, the rhymes in my poems. That was love. That was most surely love, she said. Teaching is love. And in some ways that love meant more to me than the love of my parents, because my parents exaggerated every tiny good thing, neither my mother nor my father was ever critical, they praised everything equally, she said, every effort I made, and if I did poorly they blamed the test or assignment for being too hard. Unlike my teachers they made no distinction between effort and achievement, she said, but I wasn’t fooled, I knew I couldn’t trust what they said, so it was the teachers’ opinions that really mattered. In any case, mine weren’t the kind of parents who want to be all involved in their kid’s education. That was the school’s job, as they saw it. I know many kids learn how to read early, at home. But for me that momentous event—that most important rung of my life—didn’t happen till school.

I can name every teacher I had in grade school, she said, starting with kindergarten: Miss Gillings, Mrs. Matthews, Miss Lopez, Miss Banks, Mr. Goldenthal, Mrs. Hershey, Mr. Cork. I loved them all. I loved all my teachers when I was a kid. Even the ones I’d come to understand later were not really so good as they’d seemed to me—were in fact pretty bad at their jobs. I still remember them fondly, she said.

(Here I am reminded of a conversation I once had with a man who’d graduated just a few years before from a college where I myself once taught. When asked with whom he’d studied there, he could not recall a single name.)