The Importance of a Great Teacher by Kayla

The Importance of a Great Teacher by Kayla - July 2014 Scholarship Essay

In my household there has never been any question about whether or not education was important, but one teacher that drove home that point was Miss Debbie. I met Miss Debbie when I was only four, she taught baby PE. She would be one of my teachers every year from K4 till seventh grade, and even after that worked at the school I went to till tenth. I’ve never met anyone who truly believed in education the way she did.

When I was little we all knew Miss Debbie as the crazy red-headed lady, a title she thoroughly encouraged. If we weren’t fully participating, even in K4 PE, she would start to sing. Now if you didn’t know her you wouldn’t understand why this was such encouragement. I use the word “sing” very loosely, because it was really more like off tune screeching at the top her lungs that made you want to rip off your own ears. It taught all of us a few valuable things. One, was that no noise, no matter how obnoxious, would ever bother us again. But the more important lesson was that you had to try your best, always. It was your number one job to put everything you had into what you were doing.

Since we all went to a small Christian school, word traveled fast. This applied to everything, even things other people shouldn’t have necessarily known about like grades. Everyone knew the consequence of getting bad grades, Miss Debbie’s “mommy monster” would come out, and no one wanted that. You’d spend every minute of her class, when it was an elective, studying to get that grade up. Failure was unacceptable, in fact normally Cs were unacceptable. She did everything you could imagine to make sure that all of her “babies” were doing well in school. Sometimes that meant tutoring you herself, or finding someone who could if she didn’t know enough to. She impressed on all of us that our grades mattered, and if there was something wrong in your personal life that was causing the problem she’d do everything she could to fix it or make you feel better.

The most important lesson we ever learned with Miss Debbie was our seventh grade final project. She taught life science that year, although the project wasn’t really relevant to that. She called it “What is your plan?” Every kid had to figure out what they wanted to do, every step of the way till they had a career. When we started the project she spent weeks lecturing us on the importance of school. Everything from what classes you took in high school, to college. She made sure that every single kid knew that school mattered. She found statistics to show it, personal experiences, and even had guest speakers who told us. I don’t think it was possible to get through that project without having a real vision of how important it was to go to college, or at the least vocational school.
Miss Debbie was important to all of us in getting through school, partially in the things she taught, but mostly because no one believed in you the way she did. There was no question of if you could do something. You were having trouble passing math, she knew you could do it and these are the people to talk to that’ll help you. You wanted to become an astronaut, she knew you could and would find every requirement you needed to get there. She made you really believe that anything was possible. You see it in every single kid she taught. Every one I’m still in touch with is going to college, or graduating from a great high school program. We all learned that we could do it with her, even if it was hard, because she believed in you and you didn’t want to let her down.

I don’t know where I’d be today without Miss Debbie. She definitely had a huge impact on me academically, and personally. She taught me how important it was to try your best, do well, and to have a plan that included school. Most importantly though, she taught me how important it was to believe you could do something, because if you believe you can do it then you can, no matter how hard it seems.