On Possibility, Practice, Purpose—and the Lessons That Outlive the Classroom
A Bilingual Teachers’ Day Feature
Written, edited, and translated by Anthony Zhang (张理清)
Published September 17, 2026
One teacher tapped an automotive-technology student on the shoulder and named a future he had never considered. Another urged a young woman to JUST WRITE. A third welcomed a shy five-year-old into a classroom filled with animals, music, imagination, and possibility. A physics teacher asked a high school senior to build a physical pendulum. A university only in its second year of teaching opened its doors without conventional academic entry requirements and showed a young scholar a different future for higher education.
Years later, those learners would become an education secretary, a professor who prepares future teachers, a national education minister, a Nobel laureate, and an international leader in open learning. But the significance of their memories does not depend on what they later achieved. Their stories return each of them to a time before they held those titles—when a word, a question, a standard, a classroom, or an institution changed how they imagined learning and life.
For this Teachers’ Day feature, I invited educators, public leaders, writers, scientists, and scholars to answer one personal question:
Who was a teacher, mentor, or educator who changed your life—and what did they give you that stayed with you?
The eleven responses gathered here resist any single formula for great teaching. Read together, however, they trace a quiet sequence. First, someone makes a possibility visible. Then belief is translated into practice: the student is asked to write, test, observe, revise, and think. Gradually, learning acquires a purpose larger than achievement alone—a way of living with honesty, dignity, curiosity, and responsibility toward others. Finally, the lesson travels forward, often beyond the original teacher’s sight.
Miguel A. Cardona’s story begins not in an education course but in a high school art room. At the time, he was studying automotive technology and preparing to graduate with the skills of an automotive technician. His art teacher, Linda Ransom, noticed that his work explored questions of social justice. She did more than praise the work. She connected what he cared about with a life he had not yet imagined.
“She tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Miguel, you can be a teacher!’”
That sentence, Cardona writes, began a journey that eventually took him “to the White House making decisions for 65 million students alongside the President of the United States.” His conclusion is characteristically direct: “Teachers change lives—they shape history.”
History, in this case, began with attention. Ransom saw not only what Cardona was making but what the work revealed about him. Before he had connected artistic expression, moral concern, and the vocation of teaching, she made that connection visible.
Peter Hessler’s tenth-grade English teacher, Mary Racine, recognized a different kind of potential. Hessler describes himself at sixteen as often bored, eager to make his classmates laugh, and inclined to do as little schoolwork as possible. Racine had a sense of humor, so she could appreciate the energy behind his jokes without mistaking amusement for education. When Hessler and his friends made a juvenile film about the Trojan War, she enjoyed it—but she also guided him toward serious reading and writing.
Then she encouraged him to aim higher.
“She told me that I had the talent to become a writer.”
Racine encouraged Hessler to enter a writing competition, where one of his stories won a prize. She later created a course called “Write to Publish,” in which students submitted stories and articles to real publications. Almost everything Hessler sent was rejected. Yet the rejections did not make the experiment a failure. The larger lesson was that writing could leave the classroom and enter the world.
“Kids usually see writing as a way to fulfill whatever assignment is at hand, but Mrs. Racine taught me to think in a much more ambitious way. Writing wasn’t just a means to an end; it was a craft and a profession. The goal was to get my stories out into the world.”