"If you fail, I'll kill you"

When I write I don't usually think about any rules in particular, I mostly just think of my high school English teacher Mrs. Schroeder. For my junior and senior years I had the same teacher for my English classes, and I learned a lot from her. On the outside she was your typical nice little old lady. She had worked at the school longer than most other teachers and met her husband there. At my school there were a lot of teachers that did not really care about the students, they were just concerned with getting a pay check. Luckily Mrs. Schroeder was not one of these teachers, she really cared about all of her students and it was very easy to see this after just a couple of her classes.

During my English 11 honors class all she was concerned about was making sure we were prepared for the writing portions on the ACT and SAT exams. It was nice to have a teacher who told us what the class was going to be like and stick to it. At first I hated it because while all other English classes were taking multiple choice exams on books and short stories they had read, my class was writing five paragraph essays for everything in the class. When we first started it was hard having to write this much in a fifty minute class period at the level she wanted us to. During my senior year though I was glad I had her the year before because for my AP English class she spent the entire year getting us ready for the AP exam, which she did in the same way as my junior class.

When I learned the most about writing was not while I was writing or before I wrote something, but after all of our papers had been handed in and graded. Mrs. Schroeder liked to teach us by showing us a couple of really good papers and a couple of not so good papers and asking the class what was good and bad about them. I liked learned like this because we were being shown papers written by others around our own skill level instead of from a book. Doing this helped me personally than any writing rules that I had been shown before in a book because when she asked us to find what was good and bad about the papers, we actually had to apply the rules that we had learned in previous classes.

I mentioned earlier that from the outside she was a typical nice little old lady but once you get to know Mrs. Schroeder you quickly learn that she is...eccentric I guess is the best way to put it. She was always full of energy and had no problem getting really excited in the middle of class telling someone if they were doing something right or wrong in front of everyone. During one of these moments she told the class who had the worst hand writing in class while she was grading papers. She said one of my friends had the worst, and I had the second worst hand writing of the class. Anyone with a normal teacher would probably be embarrassed, but to this day it's something that I'm still strangely proud of. When someone would finally get something they did not understand she could go from being very calm to very excited instantly. This made her class more fun because you could actually see how happy she got that her students were learning.

Once she found out when people were going to start taking the ACT or SAT she started to focus the class mostly on writing instead of what the curriculum was supposed to be. It was the first time that we actually spent some days just talking about proper rules and writing techniques. These were the most boring days of her class, partly because it all just seemed like review and nothing new. Part of me thinks that is why we spent a couple days going over rules, so she could show us that what we would be graded on we already knew. It was a nice little boost of confidence before taking an exam that would get us into college. She showed her eccentric said after we were done going over rules when she said to our entire class "If you fail, I'll kill you." Everyone knew that she was only kidding and everyone just laughed when she yelled this because its hard to picture someone like her ever hurting anything.

I'm glad I had her for two years because to this day she is my favorite teacher and I learned a lot about writing and English in general from her. What I learned from her shows because on did excellent on the writing portions of the ACT and SAT and got a 4 on the AP English exam. So when I sit down to write I do not think of any rules or proper conventions but instead the image of Mrs. Schroeder coming at me if I were to fail.