I'd like to thank . . .

I've heard some actors say that they'll find themselves composing awards acceptance speeches in the shower.  Today in the shower I found myself doing what I suppose is a writer version of that: I was absentmindedly composing a very detailed acknowledgements section of a book.  I wasn't just coming up with the names I wanted to thank -- I was composing exactly what I wanted to say about them.  And this wasn't for just any general book. This acknowledgements section was specifically tailored to a middle-grade book about a girl fighting her way through grade school and high school as she finds herself.

That would all be great -- and maybe not that weird -- except that's not the book I'm writing.  I'm writing a book about a young woman working in the city.  It has nothing to do with school.  Or kids.

So I suppose now I'll have to write a book to go with the acknowledgements section that I have so beautifully and eloquently composed.

In this hypothetical acknowledgments section, I thank a lot of teachers -- my first grade homeroom teacher for seeing me for me and telling my parents that all the other teachers at the school were wrong; my 9th and 11th grade history teacher for echoing her words in front of me 11 years later; my high school chemistry/ anatomy & kinesiology teacher for never giving me the benefit of the doubt and making me prove myself every day in class; my entire magical middle school and every teacher who walked the halls there, plus the actual hall (I said "halls" before because that's the expression, but really the middle school portion was just half of one hall) and its ratty orange carpet and the leaky trailer outside that we'd have classes in that we called the Taj Majal and which caused me to be pooped on by a bird one morning as I headed out to class there....

But there were two teachers this currently bookless acknowledgements section includes that specifically had something to do with my writing.  So I'm going to write about them here.

One was my third grade homeroom teacher, Mrs. Kemper.  In order to discuss how Mrs. Kemper was so great, I have to back up to kindergarten.  I was always the youngest one in my grade, and when I was in kindergarten, my kindergarten teacher (a horrid, vile woman whom I remember as if she were a villain from Matilda -- she's also, curiously, about ten feet tall in my memories) told my parents at a parent-teacher conference that I should repeat kindergarten.  My parents immediately bristled because they knew that would be wrong for me, and they asked her to explain why.  Was I not doing great in kindergarten?  I had friends and was doing just fine with all the activities, was I not?  Mrs. Villainess said that yes I was, but kids who are too young for their grade break down in the third grade.  "She's doing fine now, but you just wait and see.  She'll totally fall apart in the third grade."  (She also said it was because I misidentified an umbrella as a "carousel" on a test, which was actually because Mrs. Villainess had bad hearing and didn't understand I said "parasol" because I loved parasols ever since seeing them in Mary Poppins and at Disney World vendor stands, and I had my own pink parasol with frilly white trim that my mom had just bought me from a gardening store....)  So anyway, my parents assured Mrs. Villainess that A. I knew a carousel from an umbrella and had identified it as a parasol, and B. I would be bored repeating kindergarten and she was just saying that because the school had a quota they were supposed to fill of students to hold back, and since I was young I seemed like an easy target.  Mrs. Villainess got all villainy and (after insisting I couldn't know what a parasol is) said something along the lines of, "She'll fall apart in the third grade! And it will be too late then!! Don't say I didn't warn you! Just you wait and see!!" (and then in my mind she does an evil villain cackle and her cape billows behind her and her staff sparks fireballs).

So I went to the first grade, and I was fine.  I went to the second grade, and I was fine.  I went to the third grade, and, to absolutely no one's amazement except that horrible, vile kindergarten teacher's, I was fine.  In fact, I was better than fine.  Third grade was my favorite school year.  Third grade was a blossoming year for me, and I think I owe that in part to Mrs. Kemper.  Mrs. Kemper was everything I thought a third grade teacher should be: pretty, warm, wonderful at reading books out loud, and an excellent listener at recess when I sometimes preferred to sit on the bench and talk to her rather than play with the other children.  I'd always had a penchant for sitting on the bench with teachers at recess, and previous teachers would frequently tell me after a few polite exchanges, "You need to go play with the other kids."  I understand their motivation for that, but I was well adjusted and had plenty of friends, and sometimes I simply wanted to talk -- or even just sit on the bench quietly and watch -- rather than play, and I got miffed by being told I couldn't.  But on days when I preferred a bench in the third grade, Mrs. Kemper never told me I should leave it.  She listened to whatever I wanted to talk about -- our cat and dog, the book we were reading in class or the one I was reading at home, my summer vacation, my ballet lessons....  She also was my first teacher to give journal assignments.  She would assign a topic in class to write about in our journal, and if we didn't finish it in class we had to take it home as homework.  I had never had homework before, and I was so excited and so eager for homework that I wrote extra long journal entries to ensure that I'd have to take it home to finish it and could have my first "big-kid" homework.  Those journal entries were the first time I wrote regularly about the world around me, and those writings didn't just go into a void -- Mrs. Kemper wasn't reading just to ensure completion or to check for grammar and syntax issues; she commented on my thoughts and experiences in the margins, posed questions both of genuine interest to her and to make me think more myself, and generally made me feel like my writing was actually engaging someone rather than being just "homework."   I loved journaling in that class, and I've never stopped.  And my approach to writing a journal or blog -- to write like I'm talking to one person I know and trust rather than to an inanimate book or screen or to a group of readers out in cyberspace -- came from that class. 

Plus, I didn't fall apart in the third grade.  So Mrs. Kemper was great, and she will definitely one day be in my acknowledgements section.

The second teacher my shower-writing thanked was my sixth grade Language Arts teacher, Mrs. Powell.  Sixth grade was my first year at my new middle school after my parents pulled my brother and me from the school we'd been in for the last six years.  The longer we were at the elementary school, the worse things had gotten for us, both in terms of bullying and in terms of the school not being the right fit for us academically.  To put it succinctly, the school's academics were bad because they weren't the school's primary focus, and from third through fifth grade, my language arts teachers were horrible.  They taught irony and sarcasm with identical definitions and shut me down when I tried to have a discussion about it, just repeatedly telling me with a face full of frustration that I was wrong; they collectively once told me I was wrong in saying "none is" rather than "none are," even though I was right and find it shocking that a language arts teacher doesn't know proper grammar and wouldn't bother to look it up when I asked; my 3rd/4th grade language arts teacher wrote on my report card that I had trouble listening and following directions, when in my mind it was that I was bored and thought her directions were unclear and insufficient.  Mostly I remember them sighing with frustration at me a lot and telling me I was wrong.  Writing was not a significant part of language arts classes there.  I don't remember writing one story or journal entry, and I don't remember how we wrote ever being of interest to the teachers -- only what we wrote about.  No one since Mrs. Kemper at that school had encouraged my writing -- to the contrary, it was the language arts teachers with whom I had the most conflict -- and worse, no one had bothered to teach any grammar (not surprising from a language arts teacher who thinks "none is" is wrong).

So anyway, I arrived at my new middle school, which had an incredibly rigorous academic program, and the first day of school in language arts class, Mrs. Powell handed out a grammar pretest.  I looked at it and felt butterflies in my belly.  It was like that dream where you have a test for a class you've never been to.  I had no idea what anything I was looking at was.  I had never diagrammed a sentence in my life and couldn't name the parts of speech.  I could use them correctly, but that's not what this test was checking for -- it was asking about objects of prepositions and adverbs and infinitives and diagramming sentences, and I had no idea what I was doing.  I raised my hand after she passed out the test and very nervously told her I'd come from a school that didn't teach grammar and I had never been taught any of this, and she reassured me that the grade wouldn't count; it was just for her to know where we all were.  That didn't make the butterflies go away, and I very anxiously filled out as much as I could -- which wasn't much.

I don't remember if we received a letter grade, but I remember knowing that I did horribly on it.

But Mrs. Powell said it was no big deal.  I can't know what I haven't been taught, she said.  That's what school is for.  That's why I was there.  To learn what I didn't know.

To be completely honest, I didn't like Mrs. Powell very much at first.  She was very strict -- by far the strictest teacher I had ever had.  But that turned out to be wonderful and exactly what I needed (and she actually wasn't very strict at all -- I was just comparing her to a ridiculously lax school).  I learned my grammar and I learned to diagram, but the best part about Mrs. Powell's class was that we wrote.  We wrote a lot.  We wrote short stories, we wrote essays, we wrote reports, we wrote poems....  And Mrs. Powell, rather than sighing with frustration at me and telling me I was wrong and a bad listener and not following directions, told me I was good.

One assignment we had after reading the book Johnny Tremain was to write a new chapter to end the book after the existing last chapter.  I loved the assignment and loved making the ending I wanted to a book I had loved but whose ending wasn't entirely satisfying to me.  After Mrs. Powell read my chapter, she asked if she could read the chapter to the class.  I said yes, and when she was finished reading it, she said something that has stuck with me ever since.  After some student had said I should be a writer, Mrs. Powell, standing in the middle of the room and looking at me, nodded and said, "If she writes like this now, I can't wait to read what she writes when she grows up.  I look forward to reading it."

It was the first time anyone had said anything like that to me -- the first time a teacher had expressed that I could be a writer.  It made me wonder what I would write when I grew up.  I envisioned, years off into the future, sending my first book off to Mrs. Powell and eagerly awaiting her response, hoping it would live up to her expectations after my Johnny Tremain chapter all those years ago in the sixth grade....

The next year, Mrs. Powell got sick and died far too young.  She wasn't my teacher that year, and I remember during her brief fight thinking I had words trapped inside that I wanted to tell her, but they never formed and I never did, and she was the first person I ever knew who died.  I never told her how much it meant to me that she said she couldn't wait to read what I wrote when I grew up, that she encouraged my writing and told me I was good, but I hope she knew.  On this earth, she'll never get to read my adult writing, but I often think of her when I'm writing, picturing her sitting up there on a cloud reading my work.  I hope I make her proud.  And I thank her.