Patti Miller was struggling in many ways when she met Tim Walz as a student at Mankato West High School. The Minnesota governor was known to her as Mr. Walz, a widely loved geography teacher and football coach at the school who had also taught her sister.
Now 37, Miller’s teenage years were marked by anxiety and depression. Her father had struggled with addiction for years and was in prison for drug trafficking when she began Walz’s classes. Her mental health issues had led her to self-harm, and she had trouble concentrating in school.
“I felt like an outsider. At one point my mom even said, ‘I might have to take you to the hospital. I really don’t know what to do anymore,'” Miller said in a phone interview with the Daily Beast on Wednesday. “It was hard. I guess I just didn’t know how to properly express my feelings. I didn’t know how to deal with them.”
One class, however, provided her with some relief—and it was taught by a teacher who would later become the Democratic vice presidential nominee. Looking back, Miller remembers Walz’s class as a kind of “sliding doors moment” without which her life might have taken a very different course.
“It’s amazing what one person can do,” says Miller, who now works as a ceramicist in Portland, Oregon. “Even if he didn’t know I was going through all this – to accidentally change someone’s life so fundamentally, you know, that’s what teachers do. What a good teacher can do.”
Walz “really thought it was very important for us to understand the cultures and religions of the world,” Miller said.
“I somehow remember him mentioning that throughout high school we had a disproportionate amount of courses on America and its history. Yet we had this one semester where we learned about the entire world.”
For Miller, the course was also a gateway to a skill that would help her deal with her fears in the years to come: “I remember him teaching us about Taoism and Buddhism. And that eventually led me to meditate.”
The former teacher has the unique ability to get through to students who are “completely disillusioned,” she said. Miller can “get down to our level. That just makes the biggest difference in the world.”
Miller’s 40-year-old sister Kathryn expressed similar sentiments about Walz, thanking him for “playing a huge role in getting her (her sister) back on the right track.”
“What could be more valuable than that?”
“You know, there are some teachers who just clock in and clock out. Yes. But you can tell he really, really wanted to be there,” Kathryn, who now works as a psychotherapist in Los Angeles, told the Daily Beast. “He just seems really passionate about helping people have a better life. I really hope that leads to him potentially becoming vice president.”
Both sisters are doing well, although they have gone through some difficult times as adults. Their mother died of pancreatic cancer in 2014. Their father died just a few months later.
Currently, both are optimistic about the future.
“The more I see him (Walz) on stage, the more I realize how much he cared about others. He wasn’t just up there teaching. He really wanted to reach out to students and help them understand the world,” Miller said.
“What could be more valuable than that?”
