Redefining What Education means by Tajanae

Redefining What Education means by Tajanae - July 2014 Scholarship Essay

When your middle school is a small, private Christian institution on the edge of West Dallas, it goes without saying that teacher-student bonds form quickly and distrust for outsiders (namely tutors, and substitute teachers) occurs naturally. So, when your 8th grade Humanities teacher, the one you’ve had a year and a half to bond with, the one who taught your brother Humanities years before you, decides to take a six month maternity leave with a vague promise of a substitute you would love, I personal felt skeptical.

“Is it a man or a woman?”

She is a woman.

“Has she taught us before?”

No.

Aside for confirming the substitute’s gender, we received little information about our new teacher despites endless bouts of questions. To make matters worse, our teacher went into labor early and had to begin her maternity leave sooner than expected. And while I was happy to know my teacher was bringing her beautiful bundle of joy into the world, I could not help but dread the arrival of her replacement. None the less, our new teacher (whom we shall call Mrs. K) wadded through the threshold early that next Monday, ready to begin her tenure. Her teaching style was unorthodox compared to what we had experienced with substitutes, even from our normal teacher. She went into long rambles easily but, still managed to make them interesting and relevant. She wove lots of random facts into every day’s subject (which I liked both because they were fascinating and because we were never tested over them) in order to make each lesson more enjoyable. But what I remember most about her, more than her rant on how Walmart signs should say 10 items or fewer instead of 10 items or less, or her feeling of guilt when she confessed that she told the 7th graders to “shut up,” which she had only done once before in her early teaching career, were her life lessons. During the early mornings, when us 7th and 8th grade girls would gather in a separate room from the boys for morning prayer and scripture, our pregnant teach established a tradition of reading excerpts from books on feminine etiquette between Biblical readings and first period classes. Continuing the tradition Mrs. K too told us rules of womanhood, but not from the detached, impersonal pages of a book; her advice came from personal experiences from when she was “thin, blonde, and popular,” as she would say. This took teacher-student bonds to a whole new level for me because, what other retired substitute comes back to teach as a favor for a friend, tells girls to “date a bad boy at least once in your life,” just for the experience of it; or to never let a guy you just started dating see you sick (specifically: puke from too much alcohol behind his car)? If there’s another teacher out there like her I haven’t met one yet, and quite possibly never will. So when this prompt says “Describe a teacher who has positively affected your attitude toward education,” I say Mrs. K taught me that learning is not just textbooks and homework; it is also, random facts to keep students engaged, jokes to make us smile, and life lessons on topics especially like college, high school, and boys.