The Gift of Hard
This August, in celebration of teachers everywhere who are decorating their rooms, planning their lessons, and readying their hearts, I will be sharing some excerpts from my book, Rooted to Rise. Everybody has a teacher—or two or twelve or twenty—who changed her life. I hope reading about a few of mine will remind you of yours.
If it does, let them know how thankful you are for the roots.
MIDDLE SCHOOL IS MESSY. Awkwardness is the norm, cool isn’t even a possibility, and from those halls of dysfunction, high school looks like a dreamy place you see on TV. Ninth grade is the footbridge connecting the two. I had no more taken a step on that creaky wooden connector when my anything-but-cool freshman English teacher handed me a key to a door I didn’t know existed.
Ms. Mitchell was. . . different, to be kind. Odd is probably a more accurate word. For starters, she was a Ms., and she was adamant about that. I didn’t know what it meant, but her insistence on it made me know it mattered. She wore out-of-style clothes and boisterous jewelry, the likes of which made me think she had traveled, though her shoes made it clear she had not. Her charcoal-black hair was streaked with silver, and I never saw her without red or hot pink lipstick leaking just outside the boundaries that were supposed to contain it. I couldn’t imagine where in our small town she might live, or how or why she got there in the first place.
I remember exactly where my desk was in her room, though—far wall, next to the windows, third row from the front. I remember the introductory hands-on tour she provided of our textbook. And I keenly remember what it smelled like to turn the pages as she talked. Ms. Mitchell’s cardigan cape, no matter how primly draped, could not hide her brimming anticipation for the wild adventures we would go on through the written word. And I met her there despite all about her that I did not understand.
One day she kept me after class. She told me she wanted me to attend a statewide academic contest and take the English exam. She said it was different from many of the other subject areas because it required some outside reading. If I signed up, I would have to commit to the reading on my own time. I remember her seriousness and the challenge she laid down. I was flattered and a little scared, but there was no way I was saying no.
Retrieved from https://quotes.pub/
Two days later when I came to class, there was a fifty-cent paperback laying on my desk. It was a used copy of The Pearl by John Steinbeck. The corners of the cover were slightly curled, and I hadn’t the slightest idea what it was about. All I knew was that it didn’t look like anything I would have ever chosen in the library on my own. And though it read like Russian to me for a while, ultimately it introduced me to symbolism, personification, allegory, and theme. When I finished it, I had a different way of looking at the world.
I fell deeply and hopelessly in love. Not with Steinbeck, particularly, or with The Pearl specifically, but more so with the idea that books could be about so much more than the story they told. The Pearl made me think and scratch my head and stretch. I felt like I had wrestled a gorilla by the time I finished, but when I got there, it was as if someone had pulled the curtain back on “wow.”
Ms. Mitchell propped open the door; the power of story invited me in.
Jolene Lewis, my senior English teacher, took the baton that Ms. Mitchell had handed me and ran with it. Mrs. Lewis was a tiny woman—she made me, at 5' 3", look tall—but she had a capacity that awed me. She also had a nasal southern drawl, a messy classroom, and a gaggle of kids—her own and the ones who flocked to her at Healdton High School. Mrs. Lewis did not give easy As. She did not tolerate fools. And she did not say things she didn’t mean. That’s why when she wrote in my yearbook that she expected to see a novel one day with my name scrawled across it, I believed it was only a matter of time.
If Ms. Mitchell gave me a ticket, Mrs. Lewis punched it. She carried compassion and self-deprecating humor like a country club lady carrying a designer bag. It made us all want to be like her, even if we didn’t understand what it took to pull it off. While she never acted like an intellectual elite, I always knew she saw things most of the world missed. I took copious notes when she was teaching and eavesdropped like a spy when she wasn’t. I adored her for being so normal and simultaneously so unlike anyone I had ever known. I wanted to write for her even if no one else ever read it.
Retrieved from www.thriftbooks.com/
So I went to college to play basketball and study English— unfortunately, pretty much in that order. At Oklahoma Christian University, my world continued to expand. The first book assigned by Peggy Gipson, my freshman English teacher, was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I was terrified simply by the names. But that book changed my view of time. It made me acutely aware of point of view. It inspired me to be tougher and wiser and made me feel so accomplished to have grown from a book most people couldn’t even pronounce.
Then there was a poem called “The Naming of Parts” that I wrestled with and wrote about and dissected beyond recognition. It was like Pandora’s box, full of surprise after surprise—symbolism gone mad in the guise of a gun. I inhaled Shakespeare’s tragic Troilus and Cressida, stuttered through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in its original Old English, and passionately stood up for Hamlet’s Ophelia. Every hardback cover led to a rabbit hole I was happy to run through.
I could not get enough because of how much bigger the world was every time I finished a work. With each piece, I got better at grappling with form and function and language—though if I’m being honest, it never really got any easier. Teachers kept throwing out taller hurdles, posing tougher questions, holding up higher bars. The literary devices grew more complex, and the moral dilemmas of context more entrenched. Still, wild horses couldn’t keep me out of the fray, for the gift of the struggle was worth it. What a view on the other side!
In the 1990s, actor Tom Hanks made a baseball movie called A League of Their Own. It was the story of an all-female traveling baseball team picking up the entertainment baton for men who were away at war. It was an anthem for women, its characters revealing all sides of the complex creatures we are. The slapstick, inflammatory style made us laugh, but the arc of the story made us bold. In the movie’s most pivotal scene, Geena Davis, who plays Dottie, the tough-nosed, best player in the league, finally decides she’s had enough. “I quit,” she says. “It’s just too hard.”
To which Tom Hanks, the sloppy chauvinistic manager who becomes their biggest fan, replies, “Too hard? Of course it’s hard! If it wasn’t, everybody would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.”
That’s exactly why I remember The Pearl. And Jolene Lewis. And Ivan Denisovich. It’s why I appreciate the painful series of drafts it took to get me to an A on my first college research paper. I remember thinking Peggy Gipson must surely be the shrew Shakespeare was speaking of taming, but I eventually discovered she wasn’t. She was just the wall I had to run through to be able to see.
Great teachers do that. They crack open a door and cue the siren’s song that lures you in. Once inside, they give you hard. And then they let you decide what to do about it. I live indebted to them for the view.
P.S. Dead Poets Society