A Teachers Impact by KAYLEE

A Teachers Impact by KAYLEE - January 2025 Scholarship Essay

I’ve always struggled with school, especially when it came to enjoying the fact that I had to be there. There were mornings when I’d wake up and beg my mom to let me skip because I hated the people at my school and my teachers. Over the years, all my teachers seemed to do was lecture endlessly, making school boring and a chore to get through. So, when I got to my freshman year of high school, I didn’t expect anything different.
English was my least favorite subject. Sure, I was good at it, but it always felt like the same thing every year. It was never exciting—just grammar lessons, which I wasn’t great at, and reading boring novels that were supposed to “better” me or change my perspective on life. But everything changed when I met my freshman-year English teacher.
She was a relatively young woman who loved to read and adored her cat. You could tell she was passionate about what she taught. Surprisingly, I disliked her at first. She was fairly strict, didn’t allow phones in class at all, and, of course, teenage me hated that. My freshman year with her was borderline okay. She gave us interesting projects and worksheets that didn’t feel like busy work, and you could tell she genuinely cared about us. However, at the time, I didn’t appreciate her and moved on without giving her much thought during my sophomore year.
Then, in my junior year, I had her as my English teacher again. That’s when everything changed. I developed a newfound appreciation for her as a teacher. She made English genuinely enjoyable for me. We did so many hands-on projects with friends, and assignments like relating a song to a chapter in a book we were reading made learning so much more engaging. She was always there for me, and we’d spend time chatting about books, our lives, and our futures.
Sadly, she’s no longer a teacher. She moved to the city to become a librarian, and I know she’s thriving in her new role. I haven’t kept up with her, unfortunately, but I hope she’s doing well in her new life. She gave me a new appreciation for reading and English class as a whole. She even inspired me to consider becoming an English teacher someday because of the incredible impact she had on me.