The Teacher has the Pen by Darrielle

The Teacher has the Pen by Darrielle - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

As a kid we never really acknowledge our teachers being on the same level as us, not recognizing them as lower, but above us in rank. They are our mentors, idols, the guardians that give us guidance for our most developmental ages. It’s hard to believe people with such an impact on our lives can have flaws, that they actually have a reason for forgetting that paper or having no candy for answering a question right. These same people that you grow with also are in control of the strings of your future, the smallest decision impacting you for the rest of your educational career, or passing on a good or bad comment to the next teacher who is indeed putting up expectations of you as a student. These moments, decisions, or actions taught me something that my mother had told me for every experience that was memorable from elementary school up: the teacher has the pen.
This simply means that teachers are in control of a distinct portion of your future all based on your actions and positive or negative presence that you display within their classrooms. This is a lesson that all teachers I’ve had subconsciously noted but not until the later years of my junior year in high school did I truly understand the importance of this repetitive lesson that stalked the halls of every school I attended.
Despite my seeming adoration for this advice it wasn’t enough for me to apply it to my circumstances when I never experienced it firsthand for myself. In reality for any advice to work it has to be spread within your own experiences, I remember a quote I heard by the very teacher who made ‘the teacher has the pen’ a very hard lesson for me - Lessons that come easy are not lessons at all. They are gracious acts of luck. Yet, lessons learned the hard way are lessons never forgotten - and the very person to bring this hard lesson to my attention was my first year Literature teacher and class adviser, Mrs. Wolfe. This is the first time I recalled not caring if a teacher liked me or not, the appeal for her was lost for sure after she heard a few newfound sarcastic remarks that came from being a teenager and thinking your life is so difficult. I remember thinking how hard she pushed me to do good because of how much I wished to prove her wrong, yet my attitude wasn’t adjusted well enough to fit into her class. The truth was my dislike for her had turned me into the same student that I had sneered at in all of my other classes, therefore impacting an important step in the placement of my remaining high school literature classes. I was recommended for Honors British Literature the next year by another teacher in my school, which is the only reason I was kept on the advanced level pathway.
In addition was the teachers outside of literature that I completed courses with, because after disrupting her class far too many times, Mrs. Wolfe gave a firmly respective opinion to ban my enrollment into higher level classes due to authority and maturity issues. Immediately I went to my mother, spewing out reasons for her to resolve this daunting issue at school, but she looked me in the eyes and regarded me with one statement the teacher has the pen. After hours of mulling it over my initial interpretation of what she said changed. My mom and my teachers weren’t saying that being in the good graces of your teacher is the best thing for you to do, but respecting yourself enough to acknowledge that your personal opinions and thoughts should not rule over your main purpose of being in a school which is to learn and grow.
Therefore, the experience with Mrs. Wolfe was to respect her opinions as a teacher, and respect myself enough to tolerate and adapt to differences that I have with teachers, and to realize that they are in deed responsible for relaying values and lessons that you’d never forget upon you. Mine being that the teacher has the pen but your actions decide how they use it.