Awkwardness and Redemption In Junior High (Part 8 of 10)

In ninth grade, I took geometry and I sat on the front row. On the first day of class, Mrs. Peppinger congratulated us, “Class, you students are the elite group of this school. This is the highest math class that is taught in junior high.” I beamed with pride!
I need to go back in time, one year now, to my eighth grade English class. In that class we spent most of the first half of the year going over the rules of grammar. The teacher used the over-head projector and had the lights turned off. I put my head down and went to sleep. I was in the back of the room sitting with the “stoners,” guys who smoked cigarets and probably smoked pot as well. That was not a good sign. They had their heads down as well. I know I should have had a better attitude. Mrs. Mecham was giving of herself and she taught those rules with a fervor. Towards the end of the first half of the year we had a writing assignment to describe a typical day at school. Somehow this assignment sparked an interest in me and rekindled a desire to write. Mrs. Mecham had told my mother at Parent Teacher Conference that she’d rather have me print when I wrote my compositions, then write them in cursive if that was too hard for me, which it was. I went home and worked on the assignment over the weekend. On Monday morning I turned in the paper. Yes, there were spelling errors and grammatical mistakes, but at least I had cared about this assignment. I didn’t think any more about it once I turned it in.
The next day, Mrs. Mecham surprised me by reading my composition to the class! They even laughed a lot at my over-exaggerations on many of the events that happened in a typical day at school, which my paper was about. Later during that class period, we divided into groups to discuss a story we had read in a book. Mrs. Mecham appointed me to be the leader of the group. Yes, me! After that, I was different. I loved going to English. Each writing assignment was a great opportunity for growth for me.