Write Anyway

For today’s writing warm-up, write a letter to an influential teacher in your life. My draft is below – and even though it is not in the form of a true “Dear…Sincerely” letter, I think my influential teacher would appreciate it. If not, he would get to bleed “red edits” all over it –and in a way, I think that always made him happy.

When I was in grade school, junior high and high school, I never really had to work very hard to get good grades. Oh, I panicked over advanced chemistry labs and mercilessly crammed history dates into my brain on my way down the hall to Civics, but I seemed to do ok without too much effort.

It wasn’t until I got to college that I realized everything I had read, studied, experienced or otherwise absorbed up to that point was vital to barely surviving my grammatical analysis class. At that point, in my college career, I can remember wishing I had had a more difficult time so that I would have actually paid attention and not just floated through, trusting the intrinsic value of A’s and B’s in high school.

It isn’t surprising, then, for me to find that I didn’t come in contact with an ‘influential teacher’ until I was in that bewildering half-way, but not half-way-there point between my sophomore and junior year of college. I took a writing class, and met one of the best teachers I have ever known, before or since. Dr. B* was a different breed of cat. Though his feet were solidly planted in the old school, he was nonetheless very progressive. A desert-dry sense of humor and a razor-sharp wit made for interesting “red edits” all over my drafts.

I learned more from him in that one semester class than I did all four years of high school. I was terrified I was going to fail, despite my desperation to write just one paragraph that would elude his red pen and gain a fleeting yet supremely rewarding and hard-earned sense of accomplishment. At the end of the semester, each student was required to meet with him individually and present a written justification and verbal argument for what we believed our grade for the course should be. After my meeting with him, I was convinced I would be lucky to get out of the class with a D.

I took my sorry self to the corner pub and tied one on, thinking if I couldn’t purge the experience of the class by killing the brain cells that held the memories of it, I’d at least punish myself enough to, well, punish myself.

I went back to the pub a week later to celebrate a solid “A-” on my term report for that class. With that, I changed my courses for the next semester so that I was in as many of his classes as I could possibly take. Over the next three years (yes, I was a fifth-year senior), I dogged his steps to class as often as I could.

I blame Dr. B* for encouraging me to write, re-write and write again, smashing, squishing and swirling words on the page until they are in the best arrangement possible and then going back one more time and honing the message like a nervous knight would his sword before donning armor and riding out to battle.

letters, teachers, writing, warm-up