She’s muttering under her breath as she sits beside me on a couch. On both side of her are stacks of papers she rifles through. On her lap is a computer she bangs away at. It’s 9 o’clock at night, and she is once again trying to figure out the best pathway for a child to thrive.

Indulge me today. I’m writing about my wife. On Friday afternoon, Kathy Quinn will walk out of a school for the last time as a full-time teacher, closing out a career that started 45 years ago.

She will have tears in her eyes, surely, because she will miss the kids. For 45 years, she has been all about the kids. Forty-five years of working long past the end of the school day. Of buying book after book on the latest theories about education. Spending her own money for prizes in the discount aisle at Target, to reward her students. And, always, every day, teaching.

I was there when she started. I spent a day with her when she was a student teacher, all fresh-faced and nervous. The night before, I had watched her make a “feely box,” a milk crate-sized cardboard cube covered with decorative paper, into which she would insert objects for students to blindly reach in, touch and describe. Little did I know then that I’d bear witness to a lifetime of nightly toils in service to those kids.

A ”feely” box you ask? What kind of teacher needs that? Kathy is a special education teacher. Every child she has worked with had issues to overcome, areas requiring extra strategies to help them succeed. Every child was different. Every solution was different. What never changed was the inexhaustible patience needed to help them. (I’ve often thought that patience is the sole reason she could put up with me all these years.)

And she is just one of many thousands. All across the land are countless more teachers investing the same care, money and patience in their students. Helping our children become their best selves.

I think of teachers like I think of nurses. Heroes among us. It’s one reason I can’t understand the villainizing of them in recent years by politicians. I’ll warrant that everyone reading this can cite one or two who were key in their formative years.

I had two who stand out. After going through first grade with a nun who constantly berated me for my terrible handwriting, causing me high anxiety and sore ruled-slapped knuckles, my second grade teacher, Jean Pilkington, let me know I’d be OK. She worked with me to get better while letting me know that doing my best, rather than unattainable perfection, was the goal.

The second was Tom Gowan, an English teacher at Holy Cross High School in Delran, N.J. I had the good fortune to be in his class two years in a row, and through his exploration of literature and writing, he helped a goofball of a kid like me to see the wonders of this world that I had been too daft to notice. Self-reliance. The questioning of authority. Justice. Love. Beauty. He was passionate about all of it, and every day with him was an adventure of learning. His classroom was my launched me toward adulthood.

Who doesn’t have a story like that? It’s why I say teachers are heroes.

Kathy’s colleagues had a retirement party for her and two colleagues a couple of weeks back, and the room was packed with educators. Some had retired a decade ago. Some have decades of teaching left in their careers. As I looked around the room, I thought how every one of those teachers does what Kathy does, investing themselves so completely in the work. Lesson plans. Individualize education programs. Report cards. Strategies designed for each student in need. In that room I saw centuries of nights spent working to help students thrive.

The dedication is breathtaking, but I’m sure some reading this are thinking teachers have it easy because they have summers off. Believe me, they need the break. Their work is intense.

My wife started in a New Jersey school district with such low pay that she had to get a part-time job at a Friendly’s Restaurant just to make ends meet. And because she kept changing jobs, moving with me as I switched newsrooms, she didn’t get to retire as early as many teachers. Most don’t do 45 years.

I should feel guilty about that, but I know that every extra year she worked, some students in Solon, where she taught for the last 28 years, benefitted. She loves those kids. She’s not even out the door for the last time yet, and she’s already talking about going back into a school this fall to volunteer for an hour or two a day. I was surprised to hear from her retired colleagues at the party that they, too, kept working with kids after they began collecting pensions.

That’s what I mean when I talk about their dedication.

So, next time you hear a politician railing against the public schools and teachers, think back to your formative years and the teacher or two who were special to you. Keep a warm place in your heart for the teachers in your life.

As she heads into her much-deserved retirement, I’ve got a warm place in my heart for the teacher in mine.

I’m at cquinn@cleveland.com

Thanks for reading.