Day 20: Teacher

The teacher I'm grateful for today is my high school English teacher, Mrs. Vandervoort.  There are several facets to what I am grateful for about her.

First, she taught us to be technically proficient writers.  She demanded excellence in everything: our sentence structure and word choice, the coherence and organization of our essay as a whole, and the content of the ideas we wrote about.  The amount of feedback she gave in grading each and every essay was miles beyond the norm, and it included both encouragement and constructive criticism.  I was worried when I went to college that I wouldn't be at the same level as my peers, many of whom had attended the fanciest private high schools in the country, but thanks largely to this class, I was completely prepared as a writer for college.

Second, she loved books and taught us to love books as well. I've been a pretty voracious reader ever since elementary school, but she helped introduce us to new authors (Tom Robbins sticks in my mind), and she helped us see new levels of depth and symbolism and beauty in classic works (there was a Hamlet character wheel I particularly remember doing, where we made a visual representation of how a character's strengths and weaknesses can be flip sides of the same character trait). These first two things - learning to read and write well - are the main things you hope an English teacher will provide, and she completely delivered on these.

In reading these first two paragraphs, you might get the impression of a teacher who was strict, by the book, and no fun.  But the defining characteristics of Queen Vee, even more than her rigor, were her wild creativity and her generous kindness.  Two examples of this:

1. The walls of her classroom were covered with aluminum foil, and on this aluminum foil was written the name of every student in every class - except that their name had been turned into a word.  So my name might have been something like "Erinessence" or "Erindipity" - and she did that for each of the 100+ students.  It made you feel special and valued to find your name, while also incorporating a love of words and the sense of the playfulness that you can bring to writing - first you learn the rules, and then you can learn when and how to break them.

2. Every time we turned in a paper, we had a Paper turning in ceremony.  Leading up to this day, we had worked hard - studying a book in detail, writing drafts of the paper, workshopping the drafts with other students in the class, going over it with a fine tooth comb.  She understood that putting all this work into something and then handing it in to be evaluated and judged was stressful.  So on the turn in day, she dimmed the lights and lit candles; played the Beatles' song "Let it Be"; and I think there was a magic wand and crown involved.  She was helping us learn that while there's a time to work your tail off, there's also a time to see that the project is done and release your worries. 

I'm so grateful for this teacher who contained multitudes, and who conveyed these things to her students - caring and warmth, rigor and technical proficiency, fun and creativity, and a love for reading and writing.