As I crawled into bed to go to sleep that night, the ease of summer slowed fade into the responsibility of the school year. As the alarm clock rings promptly at 7:15 the next morning, all traces of summer vanished into September’s doldrums. Once again, it was September! To most of us was the beginning of the school year that morning and to some of us was just and ordinary day. The air was crisp and cool, the trees exploded with brightly colored leaves and beautiful roses lying on bushes with their open petals and very temptationable, to want to pluck and smell them till the end. Walking through those flowers and seeing all those great combination of colors and in between with “Sophia Loren” rose, just indeed, just as beautiful as the actress herself… attracted you to get one and hold it in your hand.
I was just a few minutes away from school and hoping that I would meet great teachers or even the same ones I had the previous years. Walking through the big school door I see bunch of students who seemed to be so excited their first day of school. Still holding my pretty rose while walking on the long hallway to get to my class. Long waits on the first day of school, as usual I took a corner edge and set in my day dreaming of what teacher I will have. For some reason or another certain we are drawn to particular teachers while other students are fonder of others. In my life I had studied under three memorable teachers. Teachers with which I was able to connect, to laugh, to share my misgivings were they would deserve to hold the particular Sophia Loren rose where some of them would never do. While I may have been close with each of these teachers, it is very clear, in retrospect, that each was very unique, and represented an entirely different class of teacher.
The teacher that stands out most in my head was my private English Tutor, called “Kozeta” She had a liberal arts background and majored in creative fiction and non fiction writing from Marseille, France, who also enjoyed the classic American writers; Hemingway, Erick Seagal and not to forget the Famous Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy,, Put skin. She was in the class of teachers who was more impressed by actions and honesty than suck-ups and homebodies. She was the kind of teacher who was proud when you informed her that you had skipped her class to go out with your boyfriend fishing at the river next to our school. She was the kind of teacher who preferred that her students wrote what they truly felt, and not what they truly felt she would like to hear. She was in the rare class of teachers who tried to prepare her students for life after school, not life for school. She was a part of a small class of note-worthy teachers that’s how Kozeta was. It is hard to flip the dice and get lucky twice rolling on the numbers for you to have Kozeta be your sophomore English teacher….
The bell rang for the students to get in the class. Boring thing. Went to the desk and sat till a professor showed up 2 hours late. I still enjoyed my thoughts of my teacher philosophy…
Another important figure was the eccentric psychology teacher which I had in my freshman year. She represented a class of teachers who are interested enough to be committed to a loony bin. She fell into what I believed to be the largest class of teachers, those who will snap at a moments notice, storm through the room on some sort of seemingly unprovoked tirade, and then, seconds later, start telling jokes that they had heard the night before on late night television. Her class of teachers took their jobs very seriously, and did not tolerate students who skipped or disrupted their classes. These teachers were fun, because once you got them off on some irrelevant tangent, they will keep themselves going on it for entire class segments, trying to get out years of thought and consideration in just a short period of time.
This is how I got to know my psychology teacher, because I was the one who kept her talking, so that the class could avoid taking the quiz that none of us had studied for. Teachers like her had the innate gift to educate and entertain, with their comprehensive lessons and subtle quirks and also this one would never get a rose from any of us the student on teacher’s day or you would just give them the old rose that has been hanging in your hand all day long and it stinks…
And another typo would be a small class of teachers who are personally important to every young adult. This class of teacher is the buddy, the friend. The teacher with whom you can talk about anything, be it the trouble you have been having with your boyfriend or just how much you hate this or that teacher. These are the teachers with whom you simply share interests, and thus, get along really well. Having a teacher like this is almost like having a counselor, someone older and wiser than yourself who knows a lot about you whose advice you will actually take. A teacher like this only comes along once in a blue moon, but when they do, they will affect your life forever and they for sure will deserve the whole yard of roses.
The clock on the wall strikes exactly 9:00 and it is the time for the first teacher to show up on your class. A young age pretty lady walks in… and just someone moves me to kind get me up from my day dreaming and says look who is the English teacher…After English than Math comes and After math than then the science one….and so on….I guess I was unlucky this school year no one as Kozeta and no one as Prof D or even live Prof V….
That’s sad all my day dreaming went for nothing on the first day of school….Well I guess no one deserved my Sophia rose on the first day of school….