Most people have that teacher that just understood them and where they were coming from; the teacher that pushed them to work harder than ever before. Everyone usually finds that teacher at different times in their school career. Personally, I found that teacher my senior year of high school.

I have a hard time with first impressions. I always either have my first impressions of people completely right or completely wrong, and there tends to be no in between. The same was true back when I was in high school and I walked into Ms. Repzunski room on the first day of my senior year. My first impression of her was that she was unintentionally hard and rude. One of the thoughts going through my head was “how could this lady ever relate to me”. I walked into that room with habits in my writing that were not that great, and I hated writing. I felt it was a waste of time for me. At that point, I thought my time would be better spent elsewhere.

However, like I said my first impressions are either wrong or right, and in this case, they were totally off. Instead of being “hard” she would just push her students to try to be better than when she got them. The same went for her being “rude.” Honestly, she just told it like it was. There wasn’t any sugar coating. If your paper was bad you got a big fat F. She gave no grade for trying. There was no grade for working hard. You got the grade that you earned. That’s something I admired, since most of my teachers in high school did that. They graded on criteria that was completely irrelevant to what our assignment was at that point in time.

I remember this one specific time where she was passing out papers and when I got mine I looked at it, and what was staring back at me was one of the worst grades I had ever gotten. It was an F. When I saw that I was devastated. I had thought I had done decent work on my paper so when I saw that I did not do as great as I had hoped, something clicked in my head. All I wanted to do at that point was do better. So the next paper I wrote I went in for revision five times. I put all my effort into getting a good grade. This time, when she passed out the papers, she put mine on my desk face up and the grade that was staring back at me was an A. I was so thrilled that I could barely contain my excitement. She also put a sticker of a cat on my paper so I was excited about that as well. She took me aside after class one day and told me how proud she was of me and how she knew that I could do it. Just having encouragement like that was so special to me – it showed me that someone cared.

Aside from encouraging me, she was also the person I would eat lunch with and talk to openly about everything that I needed to. All those little details (besides being an actual teacher) probably came so easy to her. She probably did not have to think about any of the extra things that she was doing for me, but doing them made all of the difference in the world. I felt like someone was rooting for me to succeed and do better in this world. I also left with the valuable tool of liking writing more than I did back then. And most of my bad writing habits were gone. All of these things aside, I feel like the most important thing I took away from her class was knowing that I left a better person than when I arrived.