My Favourite Teachers

So one of my student's mom's posted this blog post yesterday about her favourite teachers, and I decided that, instead of just leaving a comment about who my favourite teachers were, I'd write an entire post about them. It turned out to be a very long post:

If you ask me who my favourite teacher was, my immediate response, for the past 8 years, has always been Mrs. Webster, my fifth grade teacher. I always loved Mrs. Webster. It's weird though that she should be my favourite. Not for who she was, but because the words "Mrs. Webster" invoke memories of fifth grade as the happiest year of my life while I can just as easily invoke memories of fifth grade as the unhappiest year of my life, just by using different words. It was a bittersweet year.

It was a horrible year because it is the first time I consciously decided I wanted to end my life, that there was nothing on Earth worth living for. Mind you, I could not grasp the concept of "death" and it's finality the way someone older or someone who had actually experienced the death of someone close to them might, so, though it sounds horrible, it was more an ignorant decision than a self-loathing one. In my fifth grade mind, hanging out with my then-recently-deceased dog and God in heaven would be much better than going to a sixth grade where my two best friends for all of my remembered life would not be. Ignorant or not, fifth grade was the beginning of a very depressive spiral I went through for many years, as I entered adolescence right after suddenly finding myself without many of the beings I had previously entrusted with everything.

But when I think of Mrs. Webster, I remember gems, and I remember The Adventures of Coach and Peshie, a comic about my pets who became the superstars of my fifth grade class for awhile. I recall my earliest memories of writing scripts, of creating stories that became more than just fantasies in my head by my own will. I remember a year of creativity and, more importantly, being liked and respected for my creativity which, in case you haven't guessed, has always been one of the biggest things in my own self definition. Mrs. Webster makes me think of being accepted, of being loved, of being praised for being exactly who I was and not expected to be anything else.

Mrs. Ekstrand doesn't usually come to mind right away, but after considering my tumultuous middle school years, I realised that it was tumultuous for my teachers too. I was tumultuous. My very conservative, right wing, uptight Christian school was not prepared for an openly gay 13-year-old. Remembering middle school and my rather dramatic (more so the reactions than me casually telling my friends) coming out experience, I realised that I did not feel safe at school. The administration was looking for any reason they could find to expel me, and parents, teachers, and students alike all seemed to be in agreement that I was a sinner and shouldn't be allowed near the rest of the school.

I hold no anger toward my old school anymore, and I have since forgiven the wrongs I faced in middle school; something people often seem to forget when coming out to others is that they've already had time, often years, to accept and comes to terms with their sexuality, so to expect that those they're coming out to should be 100% accepting immediately is too much. It shouldn't be a big deal, but it is right now. Our society is still learning.

I didn't feel safe in any classroom. I didn't feel safe at school. I knew (though occasionally doubted) that no one would physically harm me, but every room I walked into judged me. Harshly. I was the elephant in the room. I could feel "She's a sinner" and "She's going to hell" in the air everywhere. And it came from my classmates, my teachers, my friends, and my friends parents. From people I loved, people I respected, people who I had grown up with my whole life, all suddenly staring at me with so much negative emotion and energy.

Mrs. Ekstrand's room is the one place I don't remember feeling any of the fear and discomfort I remember feeling in every other place on campus. Somehow, it seems that Mrs. Ekstrand was able to accept me just fine right from the start. Either that, or she never knew. Or maybe she hid her discomfort incredibly well. But regardless, Mrs. Ekstrand was the one teacher who somehow kept me safe from all of the hell-ish hate and judgement I faced everywhere else I went in middle school. And she taught science, which has always been one of my favourite subjects, and creative writing, which most definitely influenced my ever-growing interest in writing and helped build my writing skills while I was in middle school.

The last teacher who comes to mind is a woman who I didn't like for most of the year: Ms. Newton, my eleventh grade English teacher. We clashed. It was an AP class, and I had little interest in doing homework. It was a long year. She was gone for a good portion of the year, due to illness, and I mentally called bullshit. Just because I didn't do my homework didn't mean I didn't want to learn. I didn't think she liked me most of the year. I was a stubborn, lazy, arrogant prick, and I was well aware. I had no qualms missing her class to go work on our school play. School plays were by far more important than her class to me. Plus, I always did more school work when I was missing class to work on the play, oddly enough.

In high school, I had a lot of health problems. A whole lot. Eating made me sick almost all of the time, so I often skipped meals. But this led to fatigue, dizziness, and all sorts of problems. I was sick if I ate, and I was sick if I didn't. And I didn't drink water at school because the bathrooms disgusted me so much that I would do whatever I could to avoid needing to use them, including dehydrating myself.

So when I came into class one day, on the brink of collapsing, to take an in-class essay, and managed to write only about one sentence, Ms. Newton utterly surprised me: she went to her back room, found me some food and some water, and just told me to do the best I could on the essay. My world was turned upside down; I had expected her to revel in my failure, to rejoice in the proof that stubborn, lazy, arrogant pricks like me don't succeed in life, but she didn't. Despite the constant attitude I gave her, she still had enough compassion to care for me just as much as she would any brown-nosing student of hers.

I didn't magically change after that. I was, and still am to this day, a stubborn, arrogant prick. I'm flippant to my teachers, and I rarely do my homework. But Ms. Newton didn't judge me or treat me unfairly for being so blatantly stupid, and in that simple act, she taught me more compassion than any one else had ever taught me. I liked Ms. Newton much more after that, though I can't say I was much nicer to her. It's weird, but it seems you can't return kindness to the giver really; you have to pass it on to someone else. And that's what I've done. She gave me kindness, compassion, and understanding, which I will never be able to give back to her, but those things she gave me that day, I now can freely give to others.