Every year, Golden Apples are awarded to outstanding teachers nominated by students, staff, parents and community members who view them as the ideal teacher.

A few years ago, our very own Ms. Stefanie Jochman, now in Richmond, Virginia, received a Golden Apple award after many nominated her as their favorite–and best–teacher.

Notre Dame has a lot of extraordinary teachers, but they are all different in their own ways.

So, what really is the perfect teacher?

Is it a fast grader like Mrs. Zhang who always has her tests graded and in the grade book by the end of the day?

Or is it a teacher who bakes her kids brownies if they do well on a vocabulary test and delights students with her countless stories like Mrs. Brown?

How about a teacher who seems to have an endless amount of knowledge about what she is teaching like Mrs. Corriveau?

In my opinion, the perfect teacher isn’t the one who bakes special treats or knows everything and anything.

I think the perfect teacher is one that goes out of their way to make sure each and every student is comprehending the material at hand as well as being  a nice person a student can go to for anything.

And that is why I think every teacher at Notre Dame is the perfect teacher because there is not one teacher in the building that does not care about every single student they teach as well as the students they do not teach.

Teachers at Notre Dame do more than educate us on how to take the derivative of a number or how many protons are in an element.

They get to know us for who we are, so much so that they can identify us by our handwriting or the way we answer questions on a test as well as what we do with our lives outside of the classroom in sports or work.

Teachers at Notre Dame care for students more than any other teachers I have seen at other schools, and that is what makes Notre Dame so special.

We aren’t just a school with teachers and students, but rather, we are a family, so Notre Dame really is a home away from home.  We students got pretty lucky with a faculty of perfect teachers.