“Teachers change our lives. If they don’t, they have actually failed to teach.” This is something I often said when I was teaching Christian College students to teach lifesaving, water safety and swimming. Consider the teacher whose student has never gone into the water head first: The teacher might have told how to do it, shown how to do it, helped the student get the proper position and used every helpful technique in the book, but if the student doesn’t enter the water head first, voluntarily and happily, the teacher hasn’t taught.

Teachers are all around us: friends, acquaintances, strangers. If they have changed our lives, for better or otherwise, they have taught us something. Good or bad, teaching changes us. In old age we are reminded of so many people who have actually shaped our lives. For example, when I put on my socks this morning, I remembered Miss Mae Kelly, a professor of physical education at the University of Missouri. She taught us remedial gymnastics.

“Keep your feet flexible and functional by the little things you do every day,” she said. Then we all removed shoes and stockings and pretended to be dressing. “Drop your socks on the floor in front of you,” Miss Kelly said. “Now, with your right foot, spread your toes and grip a sock with them: Put that sock in your left hand without bending to reach for it.” We did this six or eight times, alternating from one foot to the other. Not only does this improve foot flexibility, it is for total balance, too. I did that this morning. Miss Kelly taught me countless things more important than that, and I’m grateful.

Miss Ruby Cline changed my life when I was in seventh grade at University Lab School. We could, for a $5 fee, take a swimming class at the university. We ran a few blocks to the pool at the Women’s Gym on Hitt Street and had this wonderful teacher. The first day, Miss Cline said, “If you can swim, go to the deep water,” so I headed for the deep using my self-taught, creek style of not drowning. Miss Cline stopped me and said, “Sue, you can’t swim, go back with the others in the shallow water.” I was humiliated. I’d been about the best swimmer at Flat Rock hole for six or seven years doing that loping “stoke” that was sort of like the butterfly but with arms under the water.

I’m indebted to Miss Cline for patiently starting me out on a long career of teaching swimming. She certainly changed my life.

Charles Green taught me more than “human physiology” during the scorching summer of 1936. It was one of his passing comments that stuck in my mind. Reverently and with a twinkle in his eye, he said, “God made three mistakes when he created the human body.” The room became quiet. “One was that he gave us a weak knee joint -- a hinge type -- that is not adequate for the twisting punishment we give it in sports. Another, is that he should have made us capable of laying eggs so we could hatch as many or as few as we wished. And a more important mistake is that he gave us the ability to reproduce ourselves before we are emotionally stable enough to raise children.”

How many lives, including mine, were changed by these three wonderful teachers!