Looking into the Mohawked Mirror by Victoria

Looking into the Mohawked Mirror by Victoria - January 2025 Scholarship Essay

There is always a teacher students know about before they even take a class. You hear stories whispered about them in the halls, passed down from one grade to the next. It’s impossible to get hundreds on assignments in their class. You write an essay a week. They’re rude, brash, and obnoxious. Mr. Humenik is that teacher for incoming juniors at Loudoun Valley High School. Only his second year at the school and he had already earned himself a badge of terror.
I know education is the field I am destined for because of Mr. Humenik. Not because I want to be better than him. Not because I never want to instill that kind of fear in my students. But because he teaches for the students, not for the job.
Having him for sixth period meant I had five classes before me to spike my anxiety over his class. His demeanor and the rigor of the course didn’t put me off, I was used to challenging teachers. I was the perfect student. That was my brand. But if I couldn’t get a one hundred in a class, what was I supposed to do?
As I sat waiting for the bell to ring and him to enter the classroom, my anxiety was creeping so far up my chest it was in my throat. In stormed Mr. Humenik just a few seconds before the start of class. Except instead of the greasy, decaying teacher I was expecting to stumble into the room, a boisterous thirty-something-year-old man with a spiky mohawk and a dad joke t-shirt was trapezing about. My eyes and the eyes of all my peers were about as wide as they could go when he began his first day of class spiel.
“I’m sure by now you guys have heard how I don’t give hundreds in this class,” he started, diving head first into my fears. A couple of grumbled yeses and reluctant nods filled the class. “Well, to be clear, you can, just not on essays. I personally don’t believe writing can ever truly be perfect, even the greats like Fitzgerald,” he pointed to the poster of The Great Gatsby he had tacked up against the far wall, “can be improved to some degree. I’ve had three students in my ten years of teaching earn a hundred on an essay, one of them is currently getting her PhD in creative writing…”
As he continued through his classroom rules and expectations, my anxiety slowly slithered back into some far pit in my stomach. This wasn’t some scary teacher who wanted his students to fail, this was a teacher who loved his craft. Who believed in learning over grades.
Despite our obvious differences, I began to find comfort in Mr. Humenik throughout the year. Coming to him for work on my personal writings. Crying at him when he (rightfully) critiqued my personal writings. Laughing with him once I finally got over myself and could acknowledge how dumb that metaphor I tried to use was. By the end of the year, two things had happened in Mr. Humenik’s sixth period AP Language and Composition class. One: we’d realized we were almost mirrors of each other. Granted, if I had taken a dry erase marker to my mirror and added a beard, mohawk, and glasses. But mirrors all the same. Two: he’d officially taught four students who were able to achieve a one hundred percent on an essay.
I wanted to be the kind of English teacher he was. The kind where students can find comfort and safety in the classroom while also learning. Not learning how to get a certain grade, but learning how to love to learn. To learn for the sake of knowledge, not for the sake of a “good” GPA. The kind of teacher where students complain about having more work than their friends in other classes but ace their final exams and come back the next year to thank them. Mr. Humenik taught me there is really only one goal to be a good teacher: to teach for the students. There are a million and one ways to achieve it, but if you aren’t teaching for the students, then you aren’t teaching.