Overcoming Obstacles Builds Character

My proudest moment of my fourth grade year had to be the day my fourth grade teacher, Ms. Strunk, came up to me and asked me, “Stacy have you ever considered signing up for the written spelling bee?”

“Huh?” I responded I didn’t even know what it was in fourth grade.

“For the written spelling bee, you compete for your grade level on a spelling test and you can win prizes if you win overall. When you spell a word correctly, you move on to the next word but if you don’t spell the word correctly, you’re eliminated.”

Do you think I’m good enough to compete?”

“Of course you are you are a great speller and a great student. You definitely have a chance and you will never know if you don’t try.”

I ended up competing that year and won the prize for the fourth grade. I competed again in the sixth grade and won again. The best part is that I won and at the end of the year I got a certificate for winning the written spelling bee at the end of the year, that’s a big deal for a kid. To this day I still consider myself a good speller, and so does everyone else--I am my work’s unofficial dictionary. It was this amazing moment when I knew that I was something special and was the happiest kid you could ever imagine, for a while after that. I wasn’t used to anyone but my family believing in me definitely would never expect my teacher to believe in me as much as my parents and grandparents did.

Ms. Strunk was the teacher that stood out. Of all the teachers I had throughout elementary and middle school the teacher that stands out the most is my fourth grade teacher. She was that teacher that was different from all my other teachers. Most of my other teachers didn’t spend a lot of time with their students, they were older and frankly, they didn’t want to be bothered. Ms. Strunk was different. I remember a moment in my fourth grade class when we were learning our fourth grade spelling words. Ms. Strunk always split the class up into groups. My class was worse, I was in a fourth/fifth split so she always had three different groups, one was the average fourth grade spelling, another was an advanced list, and the third was for the fifth graders. We would work in our groups during spelling and she would work with us individually and quiz us ,or we would play spelling games. She always made me feel special because she would tell me, “you’re a good speller,” and give me a hug. She was big on hugs. I guess she thought that kids liked hugs. I was ten--I think I liked hugs. Every day she would tell me that I was doing a good job; this made me feel good about myself. It was different having my teacher tell me I was a good speller, because she wasn’t my mom. My mom already was proud of me, every time I got a sticker on my spelling list it went on the refrigerator. I was proud of myself for getting to take the advanced spelling list.

Ms. Strunk was the reason that I dreamed of becoming a teacher. Most people don’t start thinking about what they want to be when they grow up when they’re in elementary school. They may have unrealistic dreams of becoming an astronaut, a professional football player, or even becoming a celebrity. I have known that I wanted to be a teacher since the fourth grade. Most people can’t make such a claim, and I haven’t waned from my dream since I had made it.

I can thank my fourth grade teacher for this dream, though.. Many of the students at Nankin Mills Elementary referred to her as the “witch lady”. She was one of those enthusiastic teachers who was enthusiastic about learning and had a booming voice, bright red hair and long painted finger nails and wild makeup and red lips. She was one of those teachers that you couldn’t help but notice.

She definitely was no “witch”, no matter what anyone said. She cared more about her students than any other teachers appeared to care. I was the quiet student that none of my other teachers ever bothered to pay attention to. But she did. I always got O’s and S+’s, won Young Authors awards through my elementary school several years in a row, yet none of my teachers seemed to ever noticed me. I was the easily forgotten child that disappeared into the shadows, the child awaiting someone to bring me back to life. That teacher was Ms. Strunk.

Her classroom looked like all other classrooms, minus the kindergarten room. When I entered, I saw a closet for our coats and lunches to the left and a computer for reading and math games in the back left corner. The back right corner was a reading corner, with book shelves filled with board games for indoor recess. Ms. Strunk’s desk was at the front of the room and a chalkboard and a bulletin board for announcements. The right side of the room had a window where I could see the courtyard and the garden that students had planted. All the desks and chairs were in rows like every other classroom. But if you came in during reading, spelling or math time the classroom looked completely different. During this period, we were grouped by our abilities. I of course, was in the advanced reading and spelling groups, and our teacher worked with each group individually.

Ms. Strunk used to tell my mother that “that kid is going to become something someday”. When you carry as much pain as I do, you have to make meaning out of what you have. Struggling with so much pain has to mean something. Otherwise, the pain was all for nothing.

Throughout school, I internalized the experiences of being bullied and never fitting in and turned it into something productive, getting my education. I was this driven kid at the age of ten. My teacher thought that my mom wasn’t allowing me to have any fun. My mom was strict but not that strict. I didn’t have fun because I didn’t want to be around other kids my own age, they didn’t like me and did nothing but pick on me. A common day of recess for me would be a nice cool, fall day so of course I wanted to play soccer, everyone would decide they were playing soccer in the morning. Everyone in class was really excited about this all day and couldn’t sit still because they wanted to play soccer at recess. Back then soccer was a really cool sport to play; no one played hockey or football much back in fourth grade. Finally, the clock would  turn to 2:00pm ,and the recess bell would ring. All the upper El kids would scramble outdoors to the playground and run out to the playing field before the sixth grader could grab it. Ms. Strunk’s class had the advantage because our classroom was the first door before the doors that led to the playground. I would run outside with the other kids to the soccer field hoping that today would be the day everyone would let me play soccer. I would run up to Meaghan and yelled, “Meaghan can I play soccer with you and Crystal today?”

“Go away beaver you can’t play soccer with us ,you’ll pop the ball.” As usual they wouldn’t let me play and I would run off wanting to cry but knowing better than to actually cry. I don’t know why now I didn’t play baseball with the boys, at least the boys would have let me play. Instead I would run inside to Ms. Strunk’s room and cry because they didn’t let me play soccer. She would give me a hug and let me help her wash the blackboard and I would smile, not sure why but kids always like washing the blackboard. Personally, I think she was just trying to get out of washing the chalkboard, she was allergic to chalk. When 2:20pm came around once again the class would get a lecture about including everyone on the playground, my name was always excluded of course, and that we would lose our soccer ball privileges if everyone wasn’t allowed to be included on recess. Over time I stopped caring because I knew better than to think they would ever seriously consider including me.  My elementary years were my daily torture years, I was teased daily and felt like nothing, Ms. Strunk was the only teacher I ever had that saw the part of me that wasn’t dead yet. Most of the time, I felt dead, that like I was only going through the motions to get through the day so I could come home and cry again for my mother.  Most of the time I never cried. But I cried inside, not out loud. If you cry out loud, then everyone knew you were in pain. It was easier to cover it up. In time you learn to block out a lot of the pain and hope that it doesn’t hurt so much. It hurts just as much. It begins to eat away at you but it’s easier than telling everyone what you’re feeling inside. No one would understand or care. That is the internal dialogue I used to cope.

A lot of people don’t understand what it’s like to be the misfit, the one who that never, from the age of seven until fourteen years old, never ever fit in. I was the one whom people referred to as a “beaver”, or a “rabbit. I was the nerd with crooked teeth and glasses. Ever since high school, I’ve tried to block out these painful memories of my anything but normal childhood.

Elementary school is supposed to be a time to grow up, to be with your friends, to play soccer and dance, or join the girl scouts/boy scouts. I was a girl scout, on safety patrol. I even danced for a few years, but I still never fit in. I was the one in the brownie’s whom no one wanted to sit next to, whom no one wanted to play with at recess; the nerd with glasses and buck teeth. I was the one who that spent every recess by herself on the swings or sitting by the wall with a book. Even in high school, although the teasing stopped, I still didn’t fit in. I moved to Canton and a high school of over 4,000 students I didn’t know. I spent the next four years going through the motions and getting through the day without any friends.

Sometimes I wonder if there was something wrong with me. Normal kids don’t go through fourteen years of school without friends. I wasn’t a shy kid. I was self conscious and lacked any sense of confidence, yes, but not shy. To this day I still lack confidence, but I’m not shy. I am my parents’ alien child, the only one of their litter who isn’t shy. “Outgoing and flamboyant, and marches to her own beat”. That’s how they described me.

So many people pass off bullying as kid’s stuff, like it doesn’t damage us inside. But it does. It stays with us our whole lives. I have spent almost twenty years trying to get over my childhood and it will continue to be a part of me always. But it doesn’t affect me the way it used to. Just recently, I have been able to overlook my past and to move on from it. I try not to think about it. I try to believe in myself.

These experiences growing up have given me the motivation to be a teacher. It sounds very clichéd to say, “I want to change the world”, but in my own way I believe I will. I will change it if I can find one kid just like myself at the age of ten and make this kid know that I get it, I understand, and that I’m there for them. To listen to one kid’s problems, to actually understand and stand up and do something about it. To let one kid know that, wow! You’re really something, you know that? You’re a really fine artist or you’re a really fine writer you know that? If Ms. Strunk hadn’t told me, “hey! you are really something special and you are going to be something great someday, you know that?  I doubt I would have believed in myself. Why would I have? It’s different to have a teacher you care for and trust to say, “Wow, you’re really something,” than your parents. Your parents always will love you and will always support you, but your teachers don’t have to, but sometimes they do. Sometimes they see something in a child no one else does, something that makes a child spark and sometimes what they say will change that child’s life.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. We aren’t meant to sail through life without challenges. Challenges and disappointments in life make us stronger and they make us into the people we are today. The experiences we have growing up make us into the people we are today. We make the decisions on what will shape our lives, and we can choose if we want to make the tribulations we go through into something positive or negative. I chose to make the trials in my life into something positive, and it has made me into the strong person I am today. At 26 years old now, I choose not to let anyone get away with anything but to put people in their place and to not care what people think of me.  Trust me, people have very strong opinions about me, but, you know, it doesn’t matter.