An Impactful Teacher by Ariana

An Impactful Teacher by Ariana - January 2025 Scholarship Essay

Mrs. Derby was my AP Language and Composition teacher during my Junior Year. Throughout that year, Mrs. Derby repeatedly demonstrated her dedication to helping her students achieve success in numerous areas. Through writing and reading assignments, Mrs. Derby prompted her students to think for themselves.

One of the ways Mrs. Derby prompted us to think for ourselves was through writing assignments. During the first quarter of the year, several Précis assignments were assigned. A Précis was a 4-5 sentence summary of a recent news article. Part of our summary had to include who the author’s intended audience was and what the author’s overall intention was. By assigning Précis, Mrs. Derby taught her students to notice motives and biases in news articles. Mrs. Derby also encouraged students to enter several writing competitions as bonus opportunities. These competitions included the local library system’s Halloween story contest and creative writing contest as well as our school’s Veteran’s Day poetry contest, Valentine's Day poetry contest, Halloween poetry contest, and a scholarship opportunity. Knowing about these opportunities allowed me to cultivate my writing skills apart from academic applications. It resulted in my writings winning the Halloween Story contest, the Veteran’s Day Poetry Contest, and the VVEC scholarship opportunity. Additionally, I learned that I enjoy spending time writing outside of school.

Another way Mrs. Derby encouraged students to think for themselves was through reading assignments. Throughout the year, we read numerous novels, speeches, and narratives such as “The Good Earth,” “Into the Wild,” “The Narrative of Frederick Douglas,” “Letters from Birmingham Jail,” “Black Men in Public Spaces,” “I Want a Wife,” and President Bush’s 9/11 Speech. For each of these readings, we were told to rhetorically analyze and annotate the passages. This significantly improved my rhetorical analysis skills by allowing me to identify rhetorical devices more easily. Additionally, seeing rhetorical devices in different contexts helped me better understand the most effective way to use rhetorical devices in my own speech and writings. For the novels my class read, we would have a Socratic seminar over several chapters at a time. For our Socratic seminar, we were supposed to note three interesting topics or quotes in the current chapters. The Socratic Seminars allowed our class to discuss important details that we might not have picked up on otherwise. This discussion also encouraged students to look deeper into the novel we were reading.

Mrs. Derby’s continuing encouragement allowed me to become a better writer and more thorough thinker, an important skill to have throughout college and into my career. I am extremely grateful I had her as my English teacher because I learned so much from her class.