As the saying goes: If you can read this, thank a teacher.

Everyone, if they’re lucky, has that one teacher that was special to them. For me, that was Ms. Pomerantz, my 12th grade English teacher.

That year started like any other, with me sitting in the back of the classroom. Our student-teacher interaction was nothing cinematic, wherein a troubled kid is rescued by a well-meaning teacher. No, Ms. Pomerantz was simply a great teacher who ran a great college-bound English classroom. She was the embodiment of capability, patience, intelligence and humor, and because of my hyperactive class-clownishness, she had little choice but to give me some of the attention I craved.

I was well into my 17th year when I hit 12th grade, still an adolescent in every sense of the word. In elementary school, I read comic books, graduating to Mad and Cracked magazines around 5th or 6th grade and eventually skateboard magazines.

But it was in Pomerantz’s class that I began to really enjoy reading book-length fiction.

I had never been what you’d call a good student. I never knew how to sit still, study, focus on the material at hand. Ms. Pomerantz took us on book report-related excursions to the school library, and the reading list that year featured far better reading material than my previous English classes had. In 10th grade, we’d been expected to read beefy tomes like Leon Uris’ 539-page 1961 World War II doorstopper “Mila 18,” which I did not read in its entirety.

I barely understood what I was supposed to do in a classroom. I’m legitimately curious about what I even thought about when I was in most of my classes. My chief purpose felt like it was to make jokes. I was the opposite of a day dreamer. I was highly attentive, but to the foibles of others, not the lesson at hand. I was often cracking wise to nearby friends, laughing at some perceived innuendo on a frequency only I heard or thinking about something funny that popped into my brain.

That sort of behavior led to my being moved to the front of the classroom, eventually directly in front of her desk. It made me feel like I was being brought to the front lines of entertainment, from the opener to the headliner.

And of course, that made it easier to direct my occasional wisecracks to her. It was one thing to make my dumb friends laugh, but when something I said made Mrs. Pomerantz laugh, that was the reinforcement I needed to joke my way to the front of the classroom. Way, way other league to see my favorite teacher smirking and pointing to her very-1986 “NO BOZOS” sign with a picture of Bozo the Clown, which, kids, was a famous red-haired TV clown I only knew from pop-culture references. It’s not unlike how everyone online uses the clown emoji to reject people they disagree with.

I was pretty certain she found me witty, which led me to act like a major Bozo. When she found out it was my 18th birthday, she had the class lineup on either side of the door, forming a sort of gauntlet. She would not let anyone leave at the end of the period until I went through it, at which point everyone was supposed to give me a birthday smack on the bottom. I’m sure today that would net multiple lawsuits, and get her teaching credentials revoked, but back in 1986, no one cared, least of all me, who after pausing in disbelief because she hadn’t done this before — none of my teachers had done anything like it before — and eventually the bell rang, and I had to get to the next class, so I ran past my classmates, who spanked on cue.

It’s been enough years that classroom memories are fuzzy, but in addition to the spanking gauntlet, I remember a group project. I thought I had the perfect out: You guys do the work of researching and writing it, and I’ll do the presentation.

It was the perfect plan, I thought. I continued to think I’d stumbled upon the most brilliant plan in the world until I took Mrs. Pomerantz’s spot at the podium to present the report. I gazed out at my classmates and came down with a world-class case of the giggles.

When I looked to her for help, Ms. Pomerantz, wisely or foolishly, told me “We’ll wait.” My giggles, however, had the half-life of nuclear waste and never subsided. Somehow, I managed to get through it, my voice breaking as laughter threatened to break out for the duration. I had never even witnessed anyone else have a giggle fit of such epic proportions — I still haven’t — but that just made it seem funnier.

My group was disappointed in me, to say the least. I have to assume she gave us a passing grade.

But toward the end of that year, my attention span, mental alertness and ability to sit still began to coalesce. As much as I credit Pomerantz for my becoming a lifelong reader, I also have to thank the author of the last book we read that year, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” It turned out dystopian literature spoke to me, and I’ve read a slew of it in the decades since high school.

I never thanked Ms. Pomerantz for that, but it wasn’t till later that I had any sense of what her class meant to me. And I was never going to be the guy who went back and visited my old high school.

But one of my longtime friends did. He’d also had Pomerantz’s class, and a couple of years after we graduated, he went back to visit our high school. His return, unfortunately, coincided with the semester I’d dropped my community college classes and worked full-time, which he summed up by telling her I’d dropped out of college.

“Why did you tell her that?” I asked.

“Because it’s true,” he said.

I was mortified that my favorite teacher, if she thought of me at all, would remember me as a college dropout. She’d never know I started taking classes again and went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts. She also would not know, unless she Googled former students’ names for the heck of it, that I went on to a career in print journalism.

And she definitely would not ever know that I fell deeply in love with the written word because of her classroom.

So this Thanksgiving, I just wanted to say this: Thank you, Ms. Pomerantz.