At 15

At 15, I found myself mostly alone.

High school was supposed to be the time my best friend and I would strike it big. We’d promised each other we’d grow old together, with houses next door and identical front porch swings. We’d make crude jokes back and forth from across our lawns, and be Godmothers to each of our children.

But after the first month of our freshman year, my best friend fell into a world that I would never follow her to.

Self-harm and alcohol use was something she did semi-frequently in junior high. But those were things I could overlook. I told myself I could help her get through that – or that she’d grow out of it by the time we hit high school. She went hit highs and lows I never got as a pre-teen, and became even more confusing later.

But at 14, she had started going to parties where cute guys would offer her pills, to make her feel bright and shiny and good about herself. She’d told me numerous times she’d woken up on a Friday with bruises she never remembered getting.

And no matter what I did, or who I told, nothing helped her.

Ever hang-out night became a lecture, or a conversation about how her actions were hurting herself. She didn’t want to hear it.

So that’s how I became isolated during one of the roughest parts of a person’s teenage years.

Dropping the ball

It was a 50/50 chance I ended up in J-1, the introduction to journalism class all students were required to take before they could join newspaper or yearbook. I had to choose an elective, and it was either J-1 or the introduction to broadcast.

I had always loved writing, so I threw my hands up in the air, and put it down as my elective choice.

But about four weeks into the class, I despised journalism and hated every single part of the course.

AP style was my worst nightmare. I didn’t understand any of the rules, and I couldn’t get why it was important at all. We would do worksheets upon worksheets with confusing questions, with multiple-choice answers that all looked the same.

I was so frustrated by the class that I would come home once or twice a week and cry.  I’m still up tight about my grades and GPA in college, but back then my grades were my life.

My mom told me if I was that upset by the class, then maybe it was time to drop it. She wasn’t happy that I was quitting, but she also understood the tears weren’t going to stop any time soon if I didn’t jump ship.

So I went to my guidance counselor and got an add/drop form. I had it filled out and signed. It was ready to go.

I just needed my teacher, Carmen Mann, to sign off on the sheet.

When I approached her after class, a bit distraught and uneasy about asking her to drop the class, she looked at me a bit astonished.

You want to drop? But why?

I just couldn’t get the material, I told her. I asked so many questions in class. Everything felt ambiguous and vague, and I always needed clarification. There wasn’t a class without me raising my hand five and six times with questions. My classmates were starting to get irritated and I was starting to feel like this just wasn’t for me. I kept running into a brick wall that wasn’t coming down any time soon.

Is it the fact that you ask so many questions that bothers you? She asked me, trying not to smile. At the time I didn’t know what she was getting at, but looking back now I know she was going somewhere with this line of questioning.

It was. I hated that I was the only one in class that seemed to not get anything. We hadn’t started writing yet either, and I could just imagine myself falling behind even more when we started that unit.

That is, until Ms. Mann gave me a little jolt of encouragement that up until that time, no other teacher had given me freshman year.

You ask questions, yes, but they’re good questions. You’ve got curiosity, which is what you need to be a journalist. You should really, really stick it out. I think you’re going to do great when we get to the writing part.

Coming from this teacher, I was floored. Ms. Mann was known to be hard on her students. In those few weeks of class she’d cussed in class – I’d never heard a teacher do that before. I couldn’t believe she’d said “shit” and “damn that” in front of children. She was strict and unforgiving with AP style mistakes.

She had bouncy blonde hair and a bright round face. She had a backbone of an attitude but an easy laugh. She was intimidating at the time, and I had been frightened to ask her about dropping her class.

I never thought she would or could see something special in me.

But she did, and that little bit of encouragement, to someone who had just lost her best friend, her sister in all but blood, did wonders for my soul.

So I stuck it out, and a week later, we began writing.

Writing

You could tell how much Ms. Mann loved writing by the way her face lit up, her voice got stronger and she could pound out writing notes to us like she had them memorized a decade earlier. 

She took the writing module of our class extremely seriously. We would take our notes by dictation -- she said this was the only way we'd learn to take notes quickly, and to learn what voice modulation sounds like in relation to how fast a person talks. She wouldn't repeat more than once, sometimes twice if you asked nicely, and she would never slow down.

Writing in that class was baptism by fire, and I was a newly charred believer. I loved every minute of class -- from the notes on how to ask questions and how to form a lead, to the strict, no-nonsense attitude of Ms. Mann's -- I was hooked.

I remember one exercise -- and I still have the worksheet -- that required my class to come up with questions relating to a hypothetical high school athletic team scandal. I thought, and thought, and was so excited to come up with what I would ask the mythical coach and principal.

We all took turns reading the questions out loud in class, and I was one of the last ones to go. I remember after reading mine, Ms. Mann looked at me proudly, and told the class if anyone ever needed ideas for questions, they should ask me.

It was the first time anyone had noticed me. And Ms. Mann was my new hero. She cared, and she thought I had potential. For someone pretty lost and lonely, that meant the world.

From then on, I would stay after class and talk with Ms. Mann about my work -- how to do better, what I could do for newspaper. I wanted to write, and keep writing until my fingers fell off. 

Ms. Mann was one of those teachers that knew how to take a flailing student and pick them up. She wasn't just our teacher, but she was a mentor, our psychologist. She was our friend.