For Me, Story

Early impressions are both primitive and primal, and when you ask me which educational experiences impacted me most deeply, my mind immediately pictures myself as about six or seven years old, sitting round-eyed and thirsty in a battered wooden desk under the sharp eyes of “Teacher.”

“Teacher,” otherwise known as Louise—since neither she nor our parents taught us the formality of addressing an authority figure as Mr. or Mrs.—ran a well-battened classroom. Louise had no need for trivial formalities to garner authority. We already knew—she had impressed it upon us with her very posture, with the brisk and articulate way she spoke—the importance of learning. And we already knew if we disobeyed her in the slightest—say, perhaps, she opened our desk and found it a piled mess of books and pencils—there would be trouble.

Shy and oversensitive, I was secretly terrified of Louise, but I still remember her as the most effective teacher of my elementary years. What she taught me, I remembered. Learning under her—even though she was scary—was not just a military exercise, it was fun, secure, delightful, engaging. She made us 100’s charts, and every time we did perfect work, we got to add a sticker or an ice scream scoop or something like that. My best became valuable. She told us, a time or two, that we had done better with a certain project or lesson than any class that came before us, and we gasped, amazed at our own brilliance. She taught me to read, and it was reading that electrified me, bolted me to couch cushions and van seats and midnights, and eventually changed my life.

Before Louise, though, there were my parents. They never taught me formally, since in the years I was homeschooled—seventh grade through high school—I did my schoolwork on my own, but they laid the groundwork early on for all the education that was to follow. They did this mainly by reading stories. Or telling stories, sometimes. Dad’s stories of little men with long gray beards who lived in forests still reverberate in my brain, though I do not remember endings anymore—only beginnings. Still, I remember his voice when he told those stories, how it dipped and graveled, how enticing it was.

That enticement lingered when I went to school and learned to read my own stories. It lingered as I galloped through hundreds and hundreds of books that Dad and Mom bought for us children at used book sales or that I brought home from the library, lingered as I outgrew Boxcar Children and dreamed on through romance novels and stumbled, quite by accident, onto some of the great literature of our language. I read A Tale of Two Cities just before reading about the French Revolution in my 7th grade history book, and to see the thin, evil face on my history page that I had only just read about in one of the most powerful stories I’d ever encountered, satisfied me in the deepest places of my story-loving soul. I was fascinated by the French Revolution for years afterward and would still tell you it’s my favorite era of history, for no other reason than that.

Years passed. I grew up. Still loved stories. Started to write books—dazzling novel-length stories—which never made it past the first chapter. But then one day I got serious about it and decided that I would be a writer. I audited a creative writing class at our nearest university, and there I met the third of my impactful teachers, the one who taught me how to write.

I called him Mr. Friederich, and he called from my words and my stories something special I had always wanted before, but never knew where to find. Every other teacher—excepting my parents—had always told me exactly what to do and how to do it. For those writing teachers, I produced small and expected stories because I thought that it was right. For Mr. Friederich, who taught us there was no pedigreed way of arranging language, who told us that words were ours and that every idea, whether fair or foul, had an equal right to be expressed—for Mr. Friederich, I produced more. Instead of telling us to write like him, Mr. Friederich told us not to. Instead of handing us a how-to manual, he read good stories with us and discussed the method of their writing. He gave me the permission I had not known I needed: to write my own stories and forge my own way. I took it from there.

What began on the laps of my parents, continued under the tutelage of Teacher Louise, and finally looked in the mirror and noticed itself in Mr. Friederich’s classroom, continues today. I am still learning to write.

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The essay above was written in honor of my expository writing class, taught by Dr. Hans Leaman, who asked us to explore our most impactful educational experiences. Photo courtesy of Dreamstime.com