I wrote my first short story when I was 6. “The Orchestra Cat” followed an alley cat who wanted to play the drums for an orchestra but was barred from joining due to being classified as a “lower breed.”
Since then, I haven’t been able to get rid of the writing bug – not that I would want to. Now, I wouldn’t give up writing for the world, but I came close a few times.
My writing activity saw a major downturn when I was a sophomore in high school. My English teacher was the opposite of helpful. I know I ‘earned’ these grades and wasn’t ‘given’ them, but this teacher provided little to no explanation of the Cs she continuously marked my assignments with; rather, she just circled numbers on a rubric that I guess she thought would explain why I got a 75 on a paper when I had put my heart and soul into it and believed I had done a remarkable job. I began to lose faith in myself. After all, she was the teacher and was probably right, as she declared with every stroke of that godawful red pen.
I entered my junior year of high school expecting more of the same. The brand-new teacher, fresh out of college, had student-taught the previous school year in the English class I hated so much. I loved her for the few weeks she taught us, grateful for how she appreciated every student’s input and encouraged us all that our opinions were important and validated, but I really didn’t expect to see her again, much less as she stood before the gaggle of largely inattentive 11th-grade students.
When I handed in my first assignment to her, for the most part I expected an average grade and comments like “Good, but here’s how you could fix everything.” She passed my paper back to me with this smile on her face that I couldn’t decipher until I glanced down at the white sheet. There was written, in purple pen (her favorite color to grade with, I soon discovered), a litany of praise directed at the writing on the page. My writing. She wrote things like “I love the way your mind works” and “You construct your argument and present your ideas in a logical, interesting fashion” and “You should definitely write more, you are incredibly gifted.” I was stunned. I hadn’t been praised like this in a long time. I began to wonder if my sophomore English teacher had been wrong after all, and if I had been misguided all that time, thinking that my writing could never be more than worthless.
My confidence soared that year. With every assignment I handed in, her praise only grew, and she came to be one of my favorite teachers. If it weren’t for her, I don’t know if I would be writing at all. If she ever reads this, I hope she knows how much she changed my life.
Thank you, Ms. Nash.
