Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!

I appreciate you, Tumblr Teachers!

Teacher Appreciation Week!

Once again, I’m going to cheat and use more than one teacher. There will be three teachers today, and they were all my high school English teachers. Mr. Hostetler was my Freshman English teacher. Mr. Burke was my Junior English teacher. Mrs. Hendricks was my Senior English Teacher.

Not surprising here, but all three teachers were great in pushing me to write in some way. In high school, I got very active in writing poetry. I knew that my teachers knew about poetry, so I started using them to help me.

It did take a while for me to actually show a poem to Mr. Hostetler. My poems were very personal, and the last thing I wanted to do was have a teacher think I was crazy or stupid or anything like that. So, the first poem that I let Mr. Hostetler see was something simple- a poem about how writing in pen is like life. You can mess up, and scratch the mistake out, but it’s still there and it’s something you learn from.

He enjoyed the poem, and told me that he’d like to see more of it. So, that’s what I did. I kept writing. Now, what was also nice about Mr. Hostetler is how lenient, in terms of real life achievement, he was in what I wrote. At one point, my class was given an assignment on what we hoped to have accomplished in life.

I wrote a wonderful timeline on how the pop girl group I was in (Illusion) was going to become the next big thing. I had it all planned out- when people would appear on Who Knows the Band?, when we would win awards (and how many), and even when the group would break up and what each member would do afterwards.

I wasn’t necessarily trying to be funny, I really wanted to be in a girl group at the time and be successful, but even I knew that my timeline was extremely unlikely and came off as funny. Still, the only criticism I got on my paper was of how many times I used something like, “down to Florida” and “up to Indiana.”

I’m sure that Mr. Hostetler didn’t believe that any of it was going to happen (In fact, the only aspect of my essay that has come true is that I maintained good grades in high school, graduated in 2005, went to Purdue University and graduated in 2009), but he didn’t try to discourage me.

Another teacher who never tried to discourage me was Mr. Burke. After dropping the girl group, my friends and I formed a rock band, and Mr. Burke was also a guitar player and would often stop by to listen to us, play with us (as he was a guitarist in a cover band), and give us tips. He was also one of the only people I let touch my guitar.

My friends and I loved Mr. Burke, and would refer to him by various nicknames- all of which were no doubt embarrassing (albeit well-meaning), and he would respond to them.

Like Mr. Hostetler, he also was a teacher I would go to about my poetry. He was probably the most involved in my poetry, being a poet himself. I remember him giving a poem writing assignment to the class, and I quickly wrote one and turned it in.

He didn’t accept it. He said that I could do better; he knew I could do better, and that I needed to actually work on it. I scraped that poem, and instead worked on (and finished) one that I had previously been working on. When I turned that one in, he read it, smiled, and said, “Much better.”

He then went on to compare my poem to some of Emily Dickinson’s works, which was obviously flattering, but I didn’t really agree.

Mrs. Hendricks was probably the one teacher who’s projects I really loved. She was extremely creative, and would allow her students to be creative in their projects. I got a lot out of her class, and learned a lot too. English had also been a fairly easy subject for me, but Mrs. Hendricks made me work.

Just like the other two teachers, she also pushed me in my writing, both formal and creative. I had this tendency to be a bit too creative with my formal writing, and she worked on making me sound more professional in my writing. She said that she wished I could get by with my creativity in my writing because she absolutely loved it (for my biography paper, I got down all the right information about me, but I wrote it as a story where the stork brought me to the house I grew up in).

She was also great at telling me about writing contests. She would always push me to write something for the contest, and while I never actually won much, she was always proud of the work I did.

I had an absolutely great student-teacher relationship with her. Mrs. Hendricks had also been the head coach of the academic teams, and she was the faculty sponsor of the Junior Historical Society (of which I was a member). She was also one of the teachers who was there for me when I had to deal with a bad teacher making fun of me.

She’s one of the teachers I drew from during my student teaching, and was one of the teachers I talked about in all my papers on who inspired me to go into teaching.

And last year, when I was subbing at my old high school, she was one of the only teachers there who actually remembered me (the other few teachers remembered me, but only by recognition- not by my name or things I did). She had me sub a few times in her class, and would even tell her students to talk to me if they had a question since I was a former student who went on to college and would therefore be a “valuable resource.” How often do you hear about that with a substitute teacher?

But really, the valuable resources here were these three teachers who always pushed me to do my best with my writing. I haven’t been writing as much as I used to, but I do try to keep it up, and a lot of the reason is because of these three teachers and their words of encouragement that I got while I was their student.