One March day, early in my teaching career at Cutler Junior High, I mentioned that the old Yankees used to say that peas should be planted by St. Patrick’s Day, so I had better get going on my garden. The next day, one of my students came up to me and told me that his dad said not to plant my peas yet; they’d only rot in the ground. He’d let me know when it was OK to plant.

Since the boy was one of the Whittles from Willow Spring Farm, here in Mystic, I took his advice. I had a great crop of peas that year!

While some teachers comment on overzealous or helicopter parents (and I’ve encountered a couple of those), for the most part my dealings with parents have been very positive.

A Cutler student came in one morning and asked me what I thought of an unfolding international situation. I answered him and he said that’s what his dad figured I would say, and his dad thought the same thing.

One history lesson I was teaching mentioned the concept of the divine right of kings. I commented that the theory was based on verses from the Bible. As it turned out, one of my students was the son of an evangelical pastor who must have hit the books that night, because the next day the boy came in with a long list of verses that, taken out of context, supported the theory.

I kept that list, and placed it in a Bible that I kept in my desk drawer for the rest of my career, taking it out whenever I taught that lesson. I particularly liked the verse from Ezra 7:26; “Whoever will not obey the law of your God and the law of the king, let judgment be strictly executed upon him, whether for death or for banishment or for confiscation of his goods or for imprisonment.”

Wow! One has to wonder what were the thoughts of Cromwell and the Puritans when they executed Charles I.

A year or so later a rather timid seventh grade girl transferred into my class in mid-year at Cutler as her Coast Guard father had orders for the Academy. Before long they joined St. Mark’s and I wound up being the godfather of their youngest son and went to his nursery school “dessert with daddy” when his father was at sea.

Also while teaching at Cutler, I got a note from a parent suggesting that I might like to participate in a graduate course he taught at Mystic Seaport. Dr. Benjamin Labaree had seen that some of my assignments dealt with the importance of maritime commerce to America. As a professor at Williams College, he was one of the directors of the Munson Institute of American maritime history at the Seaport.

After an essay and a lot of paperwork, I was admitted and completed the course in 1978.

After 10 years at Cutler, I was transferred to Fitch Junior High, which had a significant population of Navy dependents. Since I had served in the Navy in the early 1970s, and was still a drilling reservist, I generally got along pretty well with the parents.

As I told my colleagues, we spoke the same language. I understood acronyms like PCS, TAD, BAH and BUPERS. I knew that the detailer wasn’t someone who cleaned up your car.

One afternoon I was standing in the school office when a man in uniform came in to pick up a child who I think must have been his grandson. When I saw him I saw his collar device and said, “Son of a gun, a warrant carpenter’s mate.”

He looked at me and said, “How the heck did you know that? There are only four of us left in the Navy.”

I told him that I belonged to the same “canoe club.”

During part of the time I taught at Fitch, my role in the Navy Reserve was as Operations Officer of a Naval Reserve Security Group Unit in New Haven. One of our tasks was to help reserve sailors maintain their skills in order to augment an active duty unit in case of national emergency.

Our parent command was Naval Security Group Activity Groton, an hour’s drive from New Haven.

As it turned out, the daughter of the Executive Officer of NSGA Groton was one of my ninth grade students. It is unusual to have a professional relationship with a student’s parent. While the XO had visited my classroom, I had also spent time in his office on base. As his daughter once said, “When you two guys have a parent teacher conference, all you do is talk shop. You never talk about me!”

Indeed we did talk shop, but we also discussed his daughter, probably more than she realized. She was a good kid and an excellent student, who was a little nervous about the next family move which was Fort Meade, Maryland.

I was, and still am, a photo hobbyist (though I no longer use a darkroom!), and I enjoyed taking sports photographs. I used to spend some time on weekends at youth football and soccer games, and school soccer and softball games. I downloaded the photographs to my Mac and then burned CDs, which I gave the school librarian to put on the closed circuit TV with the morning notices. Often I made extra CDs for kids whose fathers couldn’t be at the games because they were at sea.

One Sunday afternoon I drove to Mary Morrisson School where the Dolphins, the Navy housing youth team, played their games. When I got near the field, I heard the announcer, who was the father of one of my former students, say over the PA system, “Mr. Welt, from Fitch Middle School, is now at the game.”

Donna, a cheerleader who was my student, threw me a souvenir tee shirt. What an arm! That kid could have been a quarterback!

One of the advantages of teaching at Fitch was that I had kids and parents from all over the world. Of course, there were a lot of kids who spoke Spanish at home, but there were others who spoke Serbo-Croatian, Hindi, Punjabi, Tagalog, Korean and Chinese. In my teaching collection I had a ten-yen bill that Japan had overprinted for use in China during the war years.

One of my student’s parents was able to read and transcribe the Chinese overprints on the Japanese note, including the note: “If any tampered or false reproduction will face serious punishment without mercy!”

After teaching for a long time, it is not surprising that one might have the offspring of a former student in the classroom.

That happened to me more than once. I got a call from a Fitch parent, whom I had had in class many years earlier, who was a little irate that her son wasn’t doing well. I told her that her son was a bright kid and that if he’d only study, he’d do fine. She was satisfied with that answer and the boy’s grades came up.

When Fitch Middle closed I was transferred back to Cutler.

Calling the role on the first day of classes I read the name of a child using the proper Italian pronunciation. Her classmates laughed and corrected me, telling me I had mispronounced the girl’s name. They stopped when the student in question explained that my pronunciation was correct; the family had changed it several years ago.

As I told her, “I pronounced it the same way your father did when I had him in class.”

I’ve been retired since 2014 and I miss the kids, but I also miss the parents.

Robert F. Welt is a retired Groton Public Schools teacher who lives in Mystic.