The View from the Cheap Seats

Daily writing prompt

Who was your most influential teacher? Why?

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Many teachers will share that they became teachers themselves because they were inspired by a wonderful teacher in their lives. That is not my story. I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be a teacher. My favorite thing to do when I was a kid was play school. I loved doing worksheets and workbooks for fun. I’ve always had an affinity for office supplies. I love learning more than anything else. But what pushed me to become the kind of teacher I wanted to be was the worst teacher I ever had — my junior year English teacher. I won’t name her name, but people I went to high school with know who it was. I’ll use her initials, JM. When I attended her class, I knew exactly what kind of teacher I did NOT want to be, and I made it my mission throughout my career to be everything she was not.

JM was not an open minded English teacher. When we would discuss literature in class, if you had an opinion or an interpretation that was different from hers, she would flat out say, “No, you’re wrong.” If you continued to push, she would reach into her crappy teacher bag of tricks and pull out the one she loved to use the most: the insult. She would say things like, “You’re not an expert in this. I studied it. I went to college for this. Do you think you really know this literature better than I do?” She would say your ideas were stupid or ridiculous. She loved to play “gotcha” as well. She seemed to enjoy catching students when they did something wrong or made mistakes. She was also grossly inappropriate to me. I attended a private, Catholic, all-girls high school, and JM was staunchly Catholic. I had no issues with that. A good number of my teachers in high school were nuns. But the judgment JM passed on me that seemed to come from her faith is what was really disgusting. My boyfriend in high school was 4 years older than I was, so when I was 16-17, he was 20-21 (if you’ve got issues with that, fine, but a discussion on that and the back story on it is for another post another time). It was not a secret that my boyfriend was older than I was, and JM more than once would use that against me, asking if I had time to do my homework or was I too busy with my boyfriend. But she really crossed a line when she called me a slut in front of my classmates. She tried to prevent me from finishing my high school career in honors level classes when it came time to register for senior year classes. I had a solid B average, all A’s and B’s in her class, higher than average standardized test scores, and a respectable score of 25 on my ACT. But she refused to recommend me for honors level English my senior year despite having been in honors classes all through high school. My parents got involved in that fight, and JM told them it was because I lacked the character to be an honor student. She said she would place me in honors against her better judgment but my parents had to sign a waiver that they and I would accept the negative consequences on my GPA if I did poorly. My parents signed without hesitation. I also maintained my grades my senior year. And as lousy luck would have it, JM ended up being my study hall teacher my senior year. Once I was working on a grammar assignment for my senior English class and I had a question, so I went to her and she told me, “You’re in honors English, you shouldn’t need help.” And with that, I refused to ask her for help ever again.

Her narrow mindedness, her arrogance, her cruelty, her unwillingness to help students, and her general attitude of disdain for her students — those were all things I very consciously made sure I did not exhibit as a teacher. I worked purposefully to be open minded, humble, helpful, kind, and enthusiastic in all my interactions with students — even the ones I didn’t like (because if you think all teachers like all their students, you’re wrong — teachers are human beings like everyone else).

So while so many people can say their most influential teacher was someone who made a positive impression, I can’t say exactly the same. Instead, I can say my most influential teacher left a bitter impression but because of her, I created a positive impact in education, hopefully countering all the damage she did. JM has been dead for many years now. I am sure she was turning over in her grave to know that, I too, was an English teacher — and I was far better than she was at that job, and I was a far better human, too.

And just for fun, here are my junior and senior prom photos!