When I was 7 years old I had my first good teacher, and when I was 9 I met Mr. Borup.

There were a few remarkable instructors in junior and senior high, too, but in elementary school the teacher has you all day, and you’re a kid so impressions cut deeper. That’s when how good or bad they are is important.

First up was Miss Seaman. For second grade we didn’t go to a regular school building. We attended class in an old mansion called the Thayer House. It housed kindergarten, first and second grades. The babies had a real playground, segregated from the rest of us. We older kids just romped on the big back lawn, ranged in the semi-circular row of trees that curved around it, or clambered on the benches that hid near the trees. I remember thinking that was strange but not minding it.

I was the smartest kid in the class. I was way ahead of the others in reading. I’m sure I was a bit disruptive about it. Miss Seaman pulled me out of the top reading group and put me in charge of the slowest. I took my job seriously, taught pretty well and became a better student myself.

She also had me stay after school and read The Red Balloon to her. I loved that exercise.

We moved to California the following year. I went from a mediocre third grade New York teacher to a worse one in Chula Vista, got pulled out of class and tested in the principal’s office, was skipped to fourth grade (where I don’t remember the teacher but do remember struggling to catch up in multiplication), and landed in the best fifth grade in the world.

Mr. Borup liked me. He talked to me and even took me with his family to the zoo, where he showed me how to do it right. We stopped on the way and bought day-old bread and stale lemon drops. He used the bread to get the bears to do the same tricks that the tour trolley operators did, flinging the slices sideways like frisbees to animals that always caught them after cutely showing us their feet. And he used the lemon drops for something even the zoo employees didn’t seem to do; he took them to the wolf cages and coaxed the animals to perform tricks.

He was a good teacher not only to me. The man had us listen to a few minutes of news every morning and then, at whatever random moment he selected, gave us a spot quiz about what we’d heard. He ran dictionary races. He read history to us while we made art (I’ll never forget his narration of the Miles Standish/John Alden/Priscilla vignette while we were building toothpick sculptures). He made us each recite or read a poem every Thursday. I remember doing a dramatic rendering of Robert Service’s “Ballad of Lenin’s Tomb” and having most of the other kids on the edge of their chairs. Better than that: the class developed its own private intellectual joke. I can’t remember how it happened but each of us soon memorized the first stanza of “Paul Revere’s Ride” (Now listen my children and you shall hear/Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere/On the 18^th of April in ‘75/Hardly a man is now alive/Who remembers that famous day and year). Whenever anyone showed up unprepared on Thursday, those are the words she or he would speak. To the smiles of everyone else in the room, including Mr. Borup.