The Professor

Write about a teacher who has influenced you.

She was a stout, grey-haired lady with a deep belly laugh and an affinity for Shakespeare. She was good-natured an understanding, something that god knows I needed in the spring of my freshman year in high school. After three hospital visits, including a week-long stay, I was falling behind, half the assignments in the gradebook marked missing. I distinctly remember her pulling me aside one day and daring to share a bit of her soul to a 15-year-old: “Everyone told me to pull myself up by my bootstraps, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even reach my boots.” Later, we were assigned a paper on a personal story–not a practice college assignment, but practice in the kind of personal storytelling college essays would require. I spilled everything in my trembling 9th-grade soul to this slightly odd English teacher, and when I handed it in, god bless her, she said: “I bet it has a happy ending.” When I had her again, after all that, she shaped my writing so powerfully that I attribute my recent successes on my papers to her. She wrote the recommendation letter that got me into this Honors Program. This stout, grey-haired lady believed in me.

But it was my short, mother-hen French teacher who saved my life. Who noticed when I left class, put two and two together, who called the office, my parents, alerting my father to the fact that I have braved the February winter to walk home and take handfuls of pills. She saved my life–she found my life worth saving. Je te devois ma vie. That kind of love from a  teacher is hard to find, but I owe a lot to that elusively powerful kindness in teachers who notice you, who care. Although the memories I have are fleeting and do not resurface often when they do, I think of them fondly and treat them with love, examine them carefully, and gently fold them up and tuck them away again. I am not that girl anymore–I can be trusted with locked doors and sharp razors and scary high ledges. I do not need advice on how to want to be alive any longer. I want to be alive. I just need someone to tell me how. They gave me all the why I need.