Here’s a pattern that’s long puzzled me: pro-schooling people will often talk about that one amazing teacher who made a profound difference in their lives — or they’ll repeat such a story as told by someone else.

The thing is, that one amazing teacher is always the one who violates the rules, who is unlike the rest of the pupil’s experience of school.

The lesson the pro-schoolers seem to take from this is: See how important school is?

The lesson I take from it — and the lesson I presume any unbiased observer with an IQ over 50 would also take from it — is this: See how stifling school is? See how important this teacher is precisely because he or she is unlike the schooling norm?!

Just imagine if individualized education were the norm.

Poems like this one, from The Writer’s Almanac, wouldn’t make any sense to us:

Poem: “Mrs. Krikorian” by Sharon Olds, from Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002.

She saved me. When I arrived in 6th grade, a known criminal, the new teacher asked me to stay after school the first day, she said I’ve heard about you. She was a tall woman, with a deep crevice between her breasts, and a large, calm nose. She said, This is a special library pass. As soon as you finish your hour’s work— that hour’s work that took ten minutes and then the devil glanced into the room and found me empty, a house standing open— you can go to the library. Every hour I’d zip through the work in a dash and slip out of my seat as if out of God’s side and sail down to the library, solo through the empty powerful halls, flash my pass and stroll over to the dictionary to look up the most interesting word I knew, spank, dipping two fingers into the jar of library paste to suck that tart mucilage as I came to the page with the cocker spaniel’s silks curling up like the fine steam of the body. After spank, and breast, I’d move on to Abe Lincoln and Helen Keller, safe in their goodness till the bell, thanks to Mrs. Krikorian, amiable giantess with the kind eyes. When she asked me to write a play, and direct it, and it was a flop, and I hid in the coat-closet, she brought me a candy-cane as you lay a peppermint on the tongue, and the worm will come up out of the bowel to get it. And so I was emptied of Lucifer and filled with school glue and eros and Amelia Earhart, saved by Mrs. Krikorian. And who had saved Mrs. Krikorian? When the Turks came across Armenia, who slid her into the belly of a quilt, who locked her in a chest, who mailed her to America? And that one, who saved her, and that one— who saved her, to save the one who saved Mrs. Krikorian, who was standing there on the sill of 6th grade, a wide-hipped angel, smokey hair standing up weightless all around her head? I end up owing my soul to so many, to the Armenian nation, one more soul someone jammed behind a stove, drove deep into a crack in a wall, shoved under a bed. I would wake up, in the morning, under my bed—not knowing how I had got there—and lie in the dusk, the dustballs beside my face round and ashen, shining slightly with the eerie comfort of what is neither good nor evil.