When I first saw the question — Who was your most influential teacher? Why? — my instinct was to name one person and move on. But the truth is, I can’t honestly answer it that way.
Different teachers arrived at different points in my life, and each one left something behind that still matters now. Some taught in classrooms. One taught me long before I ever sat at a desk. Together, they shaped far more than report cards or grades. In many ways, they helped shape the person who eventually became a teacher himself.
The first, of course, was my mother.
She taught me to read and write before school ever did. She taught me how to sing, how to love the Lord, how to care about people, and how to touch lives with kindness. Even at the end of her life, she was still teaching — showing what dignity and grace look like when life becomes difficult. Honestly, no one ever taught me more than she did.
In fifth grade, there was Sherry Robinson.
She was tall, classy, beautiful, smart — the kind of teacher who walked into a room and immediately had your attention. But what mattered most was that she made me feel smart too. When I wrote a Christmas play, she didn’t just compliment it — she made sure it was performed for the whole school. That kind of encouragement stays with a kid. It tells you that maybe something you create has value. She also taught a lesson on healthy eating so convincingly that I nearly became a vegetarian, which may be one of the more underrated accomplishments of her teaching career.
In eleventh grade came Barbara McGonagill, my gifted teacher.
I loved her class, which made it all the more foolish that I cheated on her vocabulary quizzes. Every gifted class before us had passed down the stolen answers like some secret tradition, and I was the one who got caught. What I remember most is not the punishment but the feeling that I had disappointed someone who trusted us. She treated us like people, not just students, and I think she may have been the first teacher who quietly influenced how I would one day teach my own students.
Then there was Staff Sgt. Bohannon during Air Force Basic Training, along with Sgt. Davidson.
They introduced discipline in ways no classroom ever could. Somehow, they also made me their “house mouse” — essentially the person responsible for keeping their office in order, a little like Radar O’Reilly in uniform. That role gave me responsibility, structure, and a sense that I could be trusted with something important. Oddly enough, basic training may have been the most positive part of my Air Force experience, largely because of the way they led.
Years later, when I returned to college after flaming out the first time, Dr. James Cobb at Florida Community College at Jacksonville reminded me why learning could still matter.
His class was Movies as Art, and to this day it remains my favorite college course. He didn’t just teach film; he opened it up in a way that made you see cinema differently. Jacksonville eventually regarded him as something of a legend. To me, he always was.
And when I finally became a teacher myself, two women at Darnell-Cookman helped me survive becoming one.
Linda Fralick taught me the craft of teaching during my first two years — how to build lessons, how to think through the day, how to make a classroom work. When she retired, Lisa Clancy stepped in and taught me something just as important: how to endure the job when it gets hard. Between them, they helped carry me through those early years when experience hadn’t caught up to responsibility yet.
Looking back, maybe the most influential teacher in life is rarely just one person.
Sometimes it takes several — each arriving at exactly the right time, each adding one piece until eventually you realize how much of who you are still carries their fingerprints.
Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.
