I was a bit of a slacker in high school.
Education wasn’t stressed in my house, so I pretty much was on my own. Lacking motivation and encouragement to excel, I coasted along, doing only what was absolutely necessary to keep from failing.
Although I really liked my junior year journalism class, I did only what was required. Most of the time. High school journalism students were part of the newspaper staff by default, but I wasn’t really interested in writing stories about the school’s latest pep rally. I wanted to cover “hard” news like rape and murder. For a high school newspaper. Funny, in retrospect.
Miss G. made us keep a weekly journal, a task designed to help us get the creative juices flowing by writing two pages in a black and white composition notebook once a week. All we had to do was fill up a page — front and back — to get an A. Most of the time, I went over the quota, writing several pages worth of adolescent angst over crushes on football players and going to the prom. One time, I wrote this sprawling “short story” about a dream fantasy, where the object of my affection was the singer Prince, an obsession at the time. I kept it clean, but I used my imagination to transport the reader into the fantasy, and ended the story on an enigmatic note. To my 16-year-old mind, it was cool.
Miss G. thought so, too. “You’re a good writer, La Shawn,” she wrote in the margin, the first time anyone had ever told me that. Comments like, “This would make a good column – save it!” and “Excellent writing!” were sprinkled throughout other entries. Her encouragement gave me the confidence to experiment and open up in the entries.
Not even 10 years older than we were, Miss G. was young and cool. She got us excited about journalism, teaching us how to find “the story” and covering the who, what, where, and when and basic styles of news writing. We watched movies like “All The President’s Men” and “Absence of Malice” in class and learned about journalistic ethics. The subject was great. Doing the actual work, not so great. As I said, I lacked motivation. 
While I barely completed other assignments for the class, that semester-long year-long, journal-writing project saved me from failing. I loved writing in that journal, but I didn’t like doing it as an assignment. Sometimes I was late turning it in, and my grade reflected it. But journaling created a “fire in the belly.” I had connected with something at last.
Miss G. didn’t return for my senior year. She got married, became Mrs. M., and moved away. I missed her like crazy. But a strange thing happened after she left: I continued writing in the journal. The new teacher hadn’t assigned journal writing, but I kept doing the “assignment” anyway. I bought a new composition book and made entries even more personal, knowing I’d be the only one reading them.
Every year or so, I’d buy a new one and fill it up. And I kept at it, sometimes daily, sometimes a few times a week, other times skipping a month or two. I’ve cried while scribbling in it, laughed while jotting down silly moments, and grieved over it as I captured adolescent suicidal thoughts and feelings. Those journals carried me through high school, college, my parents’ divorce, pregnancy scares, alcoholic fogs, falling in lust, out of lust, in love, out of love, first job, second job, third job, law school, moving to D.C., struggles with faith, personal days of reckoning, finding Christ, becoming a child of God, starting a blog, getting nasty e-mail from strangers, going on radio and TV, self-doubt, self-criticism, hearing from old friends, old boyfriends, making new friends…
Twenty-four years and sixteen black and white composition notebooks later, I’m still scribbling. Sometimes crying. Always laughing. 
A few years ago, I decided to track down Mrs. M. and tell her about my journals. I wanted her to know that the spark she ignited in me had become a long-lasting burning flame. I loved writing and kept up the journals, and I felt it was important for her to know that. Thanks to the web, finding her was easy. I fired off a quick e-mail, reminding her who I was (slacker student) and what I’d been doing in the subsequent years. I told her how much she and that journaling assignment meant to me.
And she wrote back.
Miss. G. remembered me! She thanked me for getting in touch after all these years and was very pleased that I’d kept up the journaling. As she was politically conservative, too, she loved my op-eds (especially the pro-life stuff) and told me she was proud of my accomplishments. She even commented on a blog post once. I felt like a 16-year-old kid again, reading her approving remarks in the margins of my journal entries.
A homeschooling mother, Mrs. M. wanted us to get together the next time she and her family visited the nation’s capital. She was a generous woman, homeschooling other children and inviting foreign exchange students into her home. And she was a believer.
Mrs. M. and I continued our correspondence, and she shared a humbling story with me. She assigned weekly journaling to her homeschool students but was about to remove it from the curriculum before I e-mailed her. Mrs. M. said that my keeping up the journal for 20+ years, and knowing what that high school assignment has meant to my life, inspired her to keep journaling in the curriculum, to the consternation of her students.
One day, I got an e-mail from one of her sisters. Mrs. M. had been killed in a car accident.
I was numb for a few days, then I called her sister. We talked about Mrs. M.’s family and faith, and she told me how proud Mrs. M. had been of my work and for keeping up the journaling. I’d done what many people don’t do, Mrs. M.’s sister said. I’d followed through by contacting a former teacher and letting that teacher know how her classes affected my life, and it meant a lot to Mrs. M.
I regret not seeing Mrs. M. before she died, but I’m so glad I took the time to find her. I wanted her to know that at least one of her former students kept doing her “assignment,” an assignment that changed the student’s life.
As I said, Mrs. M. was a Christ follower. I missed my chance to see while she was alive, but I definitely will see her again.
Which teacher(s), if any, had a positive impact on your life?
