Sixth-grade teacher Elvalisa Guzman often sees parents fade into the background at her Chicago public school of mostly Mexican immigrants. They often assume they can’t do much to help academically. But through one quiet student, Guzman comes to appreciate the unseen power of unconditional parental love.

This episode was produced in partnership with The Teacher Project and WBEZ.

When Ericka Mingo went from teaching high school to teaching adults at National Louis University, she thought her new students would need less from her. She realized every student, regardless of age, needs to know their teachers are there for them.

This episode was produced in partnership with the Teacher Project and WBEZ.

Everything in Rebekah Ozuna’s classroom is designed for the little bodies and fast-firing neurons of 3- and 4-year-olds.

Tiny chairs. A carpet for story time. Colorful bins full of blocks and toys. Even the windows are low to the ground so her students can see outside.

Ozuna teaches in an inclusive special education setting at Knox Early Childhood Education Center on San Antonio’s South Side. Half of her students have disabilities; half don’t.

Two years ago, one of her students, Naomi Campos, made the teacher take a closer look at her priorities. She realized that sometimes the way she taught didn’t fit her students, as well as her classroom, does.

This episode was produced in partnership with the Teacher Project, Texas Standard, and public radio stations across Texas.

Perhaps the hardest part of being a high school teacher is seeing students drop out or fail to graduate.

In her second year teaching at Grand Prairie High School, Rebecca Dodd formed a special connection with student Cheyenne Musgrave. "She was a student that just captured my heart right off," Dodd says. "She reminded me so much of one of my own children."

When Cheyenne withdrew from school on her 18th birthday, Dodd took it hard. But the story didn't end there.

This episode was produced in partnership with the Teacher Project, Texas Standard and public radio stations across Texas.

When Lotus Hoey started teaching English as a second language a few years ago, she felt right at home. Her own parents immigrated from China, so she had to learn English at school, too.

“Initially, when I first started school, I did not speak any English at all. I only spoke Cantonese Chinese and as I was growing up, it was difficult for me to continually translate for my parents who spoke no English,” Hoey says.

When her students come to Pershing Middle School in Houston from places like Central America, the Philippines and Sudan, Hoey can relate to them pretty easily.

Or at least, she could, until she met Emiliano Campos.

This episode was produced in partnership with Teacher Project, Texas Standard and public radio stations across Texas.

Karen Sowers was a young, idealistic history teacher at Lakeview High School in Garland, Texas when she met Donald Pierson. Donald was charming and charismatic, but completely uninterested in school. For years, Karen thought he was her biggest failure. But, long after Donald left her class, an unexpected encounter taught Karen she’d shaped Donald’s life in ways she couldn’t have imagined.

This story was produced in partnership with Texas Standard.

Sandy Lyons heard about Da’Keondrick Whitley a long time before he set foot in her second-grade classroom at Presidential Meadows Elementary School in Manor, Texas, northeast of Austin. She learned to look past his reputation, and search for his hidden gifts.

This episode was produced in partnership with Texas Standard.

Teacher Jerome White knew from the first moment he met Donald Meyer that the student was a math whiz—and that Meyer was very aware of his natural abilities. White struggled in his first year teaching Donald pre-calculus at New Orleans’ Lusher High School to convince the student to focus in class, do his homework, or recognize that he might have something to learn.

“It wasn’t a malevolent act on his part,” White says. But he “seemed to think he was above it all.”

Nonetheless, Donald earned good grades, and after several months of teaching the student, White felt like they hit something of a stride. That was a good thing: White taught all of Lusher’s most advanced pre-calculus and calculus classes, and he knew that he would likely have Donald in class for three straight years.

Donald’s junior year went fairly smoothly, and he aced his first Advanced Placement Calculus exam. But by the start of the student’s senior year, everything changed dramatically. Donald was wrestling with a lot of problems outside of school, and he struggled to complete much work at all. White faced a challenge that would have seemed unbelievable just a year earlier: convincing the math whiz that he could pass math.

At first, the Philadelphia high-school student Valentina Love Salas was not exactly excited about taking African American history, a required course for graduation. She had heard that the class was depressing. She had also suffered from racist taunts and bullying in the past—painful experiences that made her reluctant to speak her mind in a class focused on issues of race and identity.

Her teacher, Ismael Jimenez, was accustomed to at least some amount of student disinterest or reticence. “A lot of the students you … can kind of see the glaze over their eyes,” he said.

But as the school year continued, and Jimenez incorporated videos, music, and texts that intrigued Valentina, the student found herself growing more and more engaged. “Music really resonates with me, and every chance he got he put a song on or a music video that really explained what he was trying to teach us,” Valentina recalled.

Before the school year ended, however, a classroom blow-up over one student’s incendiary comment would create a schism in the class, including between Valentina and her teacher, testing the strong relationship they had slowly built.

When Jessica Carlson agreed to teach English in an alternative program for at-risk students eight years ago in Colorado Springs, she knew that she would have her hands full. But she wasn’t prepared for Kim Hardy.

Hardy, new to the school and state, resented being in the alternative program and bristled at Carlson’s sunny demeanor. Hardy turned every classroom interaction into a battle, and made Carlson dread coming to school.

There were the times Hardy led the class in defiant sing-alongs of Juvenile’s “Back That Ass Up”; the day she and classmates superglued Carlson’s dry-erase markers to the board; and her proclivity for calling Carlson a “bitch.”

Hardy calmed down when Carlson gave the student more challenging work, and Carlson survived the year. But they hardly became close, and when school let out in the spring Carlson expected that she would never see Hardy again. That’s why, about four years later, she was stunned to see a Facebook message pop up from the former student. That unexpected outreach took their relationship on a completely different, and unexpected, course.