Teacher of the Year

I've been giving a lot of thought recently to what it means to be a great teacher and the impact such teachers can have on the lives of their students. In September of 2004, I learned that my Readiness (between Kindergarten and First Grade) teacher had been named "Teacher of the Year" in my home town. We had gone to see him in 2003. Here's a picture of him with me holding Joshua:



Here's the text of a Letter to the Editor that was published in the Cheshire Herald that same September:

I recently learned that Tim Granucci was named “Teacher of the Year” in Cheshire and had to share feelings about him with your readers. I graduated from Cheshire High School in 1991 and was in Mr. Granucci’s Readiness class at Highland Elementary School during the 1978-1979 school year. Robert Fulghum wrote that all he really needed to know he learned in Kindergarten. For me, it was Readiness. That year, Mr. Granucci taught me, among other things, the importance of playing well with others, that trying new things may not always be fun but it’s always interesting, and how to tie my shoes. The first two have served me very well in the 25 years since I left his classroom. The third actually lost some of its usefulness for a while during the Velcro-sneaker craze, but became important again after I stopped wearing Keds. But it was so much more than that.

I now work as a senior circuit design engineer at Intel in Arizona and have traveled a long road to get here. I’ve had many teachers in my 21 years of formal schooling (BS, MS, MBA), and with all due respect to the brilliant professors I had in undergraduate and graduate school, none of them could hold a candle to Mr. Granucci. His ability to capture the minds and hearts of his students was amazing! He never thought of himself as too authoritative to admit when he was wrong, too superior to laugh at something silly, or too dignified to get down on the floor and see things from our perspective. (He told me, when I visited him last year with my wife and son, that is one of the reasons he had to stop teaching Readiness!) He had our respect, because he was willing to earn it.

In Mr. Granucci’s classroom, knowledge wasn’t some dull fluid to be poured into the empty vessels that were our heads; it was something wonderful to be shared and integrated into our thoughts and experiences. Discovery wasn’t something done only by old world explorers in history books; it was the act of making the great big world of a six-year-old just a little bit smaller every single day. And learning wasn’t the “work” we did while we were in school; it was the process by which we realized our potential as citizens and human beings! In short, he instilled in me a life-long love of knowledge, discovery, and learning that carried me through some of the inevitable rough patches of my academic career. For that, I will be forever grateful to him.

I’m happy for him for having received this honor because he is so deserving of it. Because he is so deserving, though, I’m sure that he is just as honored knowing that he has had such a positive and long-lasting impact on one his students – though I suspect, many more. In Cheshire, he may be “Teacher of the Year” but in my heart he is the teacher of a lifetime.