The Seniors' by Katelyn

The Seniors' by Katelyn - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

Many lessons can be learned from teachers, and I am lucky enough to have some pretty amazing ones at my school. But I think the teacher that taught me the most important lesson would be my high school English teacher, Mrs. Lochtefeld. Mrs. Lochtefeld has always been one of my favorite teachers, and I was willing to defend her when people complain about the amount of homework and projects she assigned. I loved the work load she gave. It was the one class that I had that I wasn’t bored. I had plenty of assignments to work on, and I loved them all. The writing and the reading she assigned kept my mind off of reality. It gave me a place to escape to. But not everyone loved the workload or even liked it. At my school, a lot of people just don’t care and don’t want to try, but they still expect to get good grades and be good athletes, even though they put forward no effort. So Mrs. Lochtefeld didn’t help them in their eyes. They saw her as a pain who gave too much homework and complained about her all the time behind her back. I honestly don’t know if she knew or not.
However, one day, she learned. The day she did was the planned senior ditched day when the majority of the class failed to show up to school, deciding to either stay home and sleep or go to the zoo or King’s Island. She knew that day because of what they did the night before. Traditionally for my school, the night before the planned senior ditched day is when the senior do their prank. Many years, the prank is harmless with string everywhere in the hallway or bras all over the lockers. But this past year, the senior decided they wanted to top everything done so far. But what they did really wasn’t a prank but rather trashing the school. I pulled into my school’s parking lot that morning, and my good mood disappeared. There was trash in front of the door with caution wrapped around the trees and door handles. Glitter and shredded paper were everywhere along with Styrofoam cups. The trees were partly toilet-papered, and that was simply the outside. I walked into the school, and my once-good mood was completely gone. Pure trash filled the walls. It was like the outside with cups, toilet paper, glitter, shredded paper, trash, etc. thrown on the floor. Teachers and janitors were trying to clear the halls, so students could walk down them to get to their classes.
The seniors were told that no one was allowed in the classrooms which made them mad. With the help of the guidance counselor (who didn’t know of their plans), they got into one English classroom, Mrs. Lochtefeld. They completely destroyed her room by piling all the desks with chair attachments into the middle of the room. They dumped the trash can on top of it along with some of the toilet paper, cups, and shredded paper. Then they saran-wrapped it. They knocked everything off her desk and wrote a message to her that wasn’t nice. I didn’t get to see her in the morning, but I looked in her room as I past, and it was awful. I saw pictures on Facebook along with comments that made me want to cry or punch the wall.
Mrs. Lochtefeld is a nice lady; she doesn’t deserve this. Rumor has it, she cried, and I don’t blame her. Of her three classes that she had to teach a day (my school has four blocks), two are senior classes. She still had to face them for the rest of their time at the school, and she did. She stayed at school that day, teaching the few seniors that showed up. Mrs. Lochtefeld as also at school the next day and the next, continuing to teach; however, she made some slight adjustments. According to some of the seniors, she created a couple of assignments dealing with rudeness. Mrs. Lochtefeld taught me to keep my head high. I might be able to escape real life with her assignments and avoid the conflict and the trouble, but sometimes, it hits you right in the face. And you can’t escape. The pain is constantly in front of you, and you have to learn to live with it and made the best. That’s what she did.