My Teacher

A long time ago, in a land far away, I went to high school. In fact, I changed schools four times during my high school career, and I also changed countries four times. And no, if you are like me and taking a second look at that word, I did not write counties, I wrote countries. High school can be a land mine for anyone, but all of the uncertainty in my life did not help my odds very much.

But like most people, I have several high school teachers who really mattered and made high school matter for me. One of those people is Rob Quiring, my honors English teacher and the director of Breaking the Prairie Wolf Code, the play I was in my ninth grade year.

Well, my twentieth high school reunion is coming up this May. I have spent the last ten years in the same house in Miami County, and I have stayed at the same job since 1998. As part of my job, I frequently do presentations at conferences. Just last week, I went to the National Council of Teachers of English convention in Chicago to present on “The Transition from High School to College” during a larger session called High School Matters.

You will never guess what happened. My high school English teacher, Mr. Quiring, was attending the conference for the first time, and he actually came to my session. The whole thing was a bit surreal for me. Interestingly, Mr. Quiring arrived a bit late to the session because he was getting Billy Collin’s autograph, which is what I would have been doing had I not agreed to present. It was nice, after all this time, to still earn my teacher’s approval.

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Posted by admin on Nov 23 2011. Filed under Beth Gulley, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry