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Zooming Across Time Zones and Decades
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Paul Magnuson
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Head of Educational Research
Leysin American School in Switzerland
6 min read
September 2025
What happens when a former student reconnects with their teacher nearly three decades later? In this personal story, Paul Magnuson reflects on a conversation with Jacob Steele, once a teenager at a Spanish immersion camp in Minnesota, now a multitalented professional.
Their exchange highlights the power of feedback loops, the value of teacher autonomy, and the profound, often unseen, impact educators can have on the lives of their students. This piece is both a reminder of why teaching matters and an invitation to reach out to those important in our own development.
Reunions and Reflections
Every now and then on social media one of my contacts out in 'ed world', as I like to think about it, posts a heartwarming note from a student. “Mrs. Carlson, this year would not have been the same without your class. You are so passionate, so nice, thank you!” That sort of thing. We all need that sort of feedback, because frankly, we all sort of wonder if we’re making a positive impact, if we’re making a difference.
Less often do we get to talk with a student we had in class decades ago (hmmm… Perhaps class reunions should include teachers who were working in the school at the same time as the alums). There would be a chance to thank teachers (or with the clarity of hindsight, apologise to them!) and a chance for the teachers to catch glimpses of their efforts in the lives of their former students. Class reunion organisers, take note!
Every now and then as a teacher you do get a chance to talk with a former student who has become a life-tested adult. You do get a chance to see if what you did has mattered. And that is huge.
A Chance Encounter Across Decades
Jacob Steele contacted me a couple of weeks ago, asking if I were the Paul Magnuson that worked at Concordia Language Villages, the one who went by Fausto at the Spanish immersion programme. I wrote back that yes indeed, that was me, back in the summer of 1997. Jacob is now 43, I’m 59. His career took him to the State of Virginia, mine to Switzerland.
We arranged to Zoom across the time zones and the past 28 years. Here is what I learned.
In Summer 1997, Jacob had just completed his ninth grade year in school. He described his school experience as lonely and his level of engagement as low. He could earn a B without doing much work at all, just taking the tests. He says he felt angry inside and that he had daily shouting matches with his mother. Things were not going well.
His parents sent him to the Spanish immersion programme at Concordia Language Villages in northern Minnesota. Jacob arrived at a well used bible camp, rented by Concordia, on the shore of Lake Andrusia. He selected the name Jacobo and painted a nametag. He moved into a cabin with seven or eight other boys. The camp signage was in Spanish, the counsellors a mix of non-native Spanish speakers and native speakers from all over the Spanish-speaking world. I was one of the non-native speakers, a halting speaker at that. Perhaps I had no business teaching Spanish that summer, I don’t know. I was branching out after years of teaching in the German language programme.
Jacob remembers being in a beginning class, with other students he didn’t know, and with me, Fausto. It was a chance for him to hit the reset button, to start from scratch. I of course knew nothing about him, not even his real name. We met multiple times a day for class and crossed paths I’m sure in small and large group activities. I taught as best I could, with my limited Spanish, and like we all do, hoped that what I was doing was good enough, that students were learning some Spanish and finding the motivation to learn more. You often don’t really know if you are being as effective as you hope.
Finding Motivation Through Feedback
That summer was a turning point for Jacob, the student of Spanish named Jacobo. I’m sure there were a number of factors at play, not the least of which was hanging out with new peers. As far as the teaching goes, Jacob thinks it was a feedback loop we fell into that made a big difference. “When I accomplished something difficult you’d give me something harder with a simple nod or at most a word or two of praise.” Receiving something more to do became a signal that he was doing well. Completing that additional work led again to more work, another sign that he was doing well. A positive feedback loop. “I came into the programme as a middling student compared to the other students, but being given “special” off-curriculum assignments by an adult, and not even for extra credit but just because that adult believed I could do it, made me believe in my own abilities as a learner and feel seen and heard,” Jacob says. “This relationship and method made me enjoy learning simply for the joy of mastery over difficult skills and ideas. The next year when I returned to the Language Villages I was in the highest-level group, and my grades in the local public high school had gone from 2.8 to 4.0. Fausto’s method probably wouldn’t work for every student, but what was special was a teacher seeing my abilities and motivation as an individual learner and catering the pedagogy to my specific needs at that time.”
I frankly cannot remember what sort of classroom set up I created that summer that allowed me to consistently give additional work. I do remember that the Language Villages had a flexible curriculum, perhaps to a fault, at least in the 1990s at this particular Spanish programme. We teachers really could construct the course as we saw fit. That’s a challenge, and an opportunity. It’s not that hard to give extra work when you as a teacher have lots of autonomy.
Influences That Shape Teaching
I also remember that in 1997 I was still in thrall (frankly, I still am) to the teacher who made the biggest impression on my teaching career, Leo van Lier, a philosophical Dutch polyglot who taught second language acquisition in the masters programmes in Monterey, California. Leo routinely brought hard copies of articles to class, in a metal mesh inbox. We students were free to rifle through and take anything we wanted to read. Lots of random stuff. Mixed with everything else were excerpts from any one of Leo’s numerous writing projects. I read those with a special sort of fervor, I felt invited to engage. After a while Leo would put drafts of his work in my hands before class started. “Let me know what you think,” he’d say. High octane fuel for motivation. I didn’t want to disappoint him. And I wanted to be like Leo as a teacher. I wanted to engage with students in a similar way.
Perhaps this is what Jacob was feeling as a student among the pines and maples and oaks of summer camp. We were standing shoulder to shoulder as learners. I didn’t know him well enough to be judgy, I wasn’t familiar with his story at all. He was free to learn. Jacobo gave the cover for Jacob to just be Jacob, to be a good learner, to do the extra work.
During our call we swapped stories of language learning. We are similar, we’ve both dabbled in lots of different languages, maybe not getting proficient in any. In addition to minoring in Spanish in college, he developed interest in Japanese, Hindi, French and, as if having forgotten it for a bit entirely, he said, “Oh, and Turkish.” Jacob considers himself an autodidact. He finished school and had a career in the navy, completed not one but two masters degrees, worked for USAID for ten years before it was suddenly unfunded by the second Trump administration. Slid quickly into a third career in mental health counseling, the focus of his second masters.
Reconnecting After 28 Years
I asked him how he found me. He says he remembered my name all these years, my real name and my camp name. When his mum gave him a couple bins of stored items from childhood recently, he came across the memory book from that summer in 1997. Jacob looked me up online and contacted me through LinkedIn.
The Lasting Impact of Teachers
We teachers do make a difference every now and then. Perhaps more often than we’ll ever learn about. There are Jacobos in your past, some who remember your name, even decades later. Some who are thankful that you took the time to see them as the person they are, not the person that others made them out to be. Some who connected with you and the way you teach in such a way that, when they looked back years later, they associated you with a significant turning point in their lives.
I can’t thank Jacob enough for reaching out. If you have a memory of a special teacher, you might like to do the same. Send a note, tell them they made a difference, tell them why. You’ll be making a difference in turn: for them, their motivation, and the students they have today.
If this piece resonates with you, take a moment to reflect on the educators who have influenced you, or consider the students whose lives you may be shaping today. A simple message of thanks or encouragement could mean more than you realize. Who might you reach out to?
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