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Last week, I heard some sad news. My freshman high school English teacher, Roberta Quandt, passed away. I’d been thinking about her a lot recently, and the news came as a bit of a shock.

See, Mrs. Quandt, who was, at the time, Miss Flack (she was dating the vice principal, whom she later married, but the fact of their dating squicked us out to no end, never mind the conspiracy theories it engendered . . . ) anyway, Mrs. Quandt taught a sort of minimalist, broad-stroke intro to world literature for “advanced” freshmen. I’m pretty sure that I recall Aesop being involved in the syllabus.

I didn’t like Mrs. Quandt. This was not really her fault. I didn’t start to like school in general until my sophomore year of high school, when I fell in love with it – no middle ground, moderate nonsense for me, thank-you-very-much. Mrs. Quant had the dubious pleasure of “teaching” me the year before my educational epiphany. As a result, I was predisposed to hate her class. The Aesop and the random poetry and the forced suffering through Shakespeare that we utterly failed to understand didn’t help.

Grades-wise, I didn’t do well.

At all.

This was in spite of the fact that I devoured books and more than once was caught reading an unrelated novel under my desk in the back corner while Mrs. Quandt scribbled neatly-outlined notes on the overhead projector.

When it came to officially-sanctioned assignments, I just didn’t care.

Then, sometime in the spring, near-ish to the end of the school year, we came to the creative writing portion of the class. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure she put it near the end of the year because it was “easy” and by that point, she had to be unbearably tired of trying to cram a love of literature down our reluctant throats. Anyway, she set us an assignment – three short stories. At least three pages apiece.

I wrote the stories. One ended up being five pages long, which seemed like ridiculous overkill to me at the time, since my philosophy of school work was to do as little as possible to fulfill the requirements. (Ironically, the philosophical shift that made me love school was when I decided to start working my tail off, going far enough above and beyond that the work actually got *interesting.*) Anyway, I turned in the stories. I was mostly pretty pleased that I’d actually completed an assignment on time and in full.

A little time went by.

Grading time, I assume.

Then one day, Mrs. Quandt asked me to stay after class. I was so embarrassed that I must have been purple. I remember trying frantically to remember what I could have screwed up badly enough to warrant an after-class “talk.” I came close to cardiac arrest at the thought that whatever it was might result in a phone call to my parents.

After everyone left, I trudged up to her desk.

She said, “I want to show you something.”

She pulled out the packet of stories I’d handed in. In the top right-hand corner, in that dull red teacher-pencil, there was a 100, with a circle around it. She pushed the papers across the desk with one finger and kept them pinned there. She looked very serious. I remember thinking she was going to accuse me of plagiarism.

Instead, she just held my gaze and said; “You need to keep doing this. Writing. You have a talent and you need to make something of it.”

I was still embarrassed, but for a whole other reason. It wasn’t a time in my life when I got a lot of compliments or encouragement, mostly because I wasn’t doing much that was worthy of compliment or encouragement.

Mrs. Quandt was the first person who ever told me that I could write. That I *should* write. There was some stammering on my part and then I pretty much high-tailed it out of the room with the stories crammed into my backpack. I wish I could say that we became really close and she mentored me and I became the Editor-in-Chief of the school poetry journal, but it wasn’t that way. Mostly, she looked at me like I wasn’t a total screw up. In turn, I tried to see what might be interesting about Chinua Achebe (lots, as it turns out.)

Many of people have told me many very nice things over the years, both before and after Mrs. Quandt. I’ve been lucky that way. But sometimes in life, someone says one little thing – even though it’s not apparent at the time – that acts as a tipping point. Pushes the fulcrum. Changes the outcome.

One little, red-penciled number. A couple of small but sincerely-spoken words.

I’ve carried those with me for a long time.

They were a tipping point in my life, and with all the wonderfulness that’s happened in the last year with my writing, because of my writing, I’ve thought several times that I should look her up and say thanks. It turns out that I waited too long to tell her in private. So, I guess the only thing I can do is tell her in public.

Thank you, Mrs. Quandt.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 10:10 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.