Mrs. Charles, a woman committed to her work, always came off as persistent. Anything she wanted done, she got done. And there was one thing she wanted out of her work more than anything else: for her students to learn. From the moment I walked into her class, I knew I was walking into a new experience, one I wasn’t all too excited for. Unlike any other class I had, the desks were set in a horseshoe, her cushioned chair right in the middle. It was the perfect set up for her to keep her eyes on everyone. Books upon books lined the walls and encased the old, overused chalkboard. The projector that was set in the ceiling looked brand new, as if it hadn’t been turned on once, and not a single chair was out of place. I felt as if I was stepping into the past, and when I saw Mrs. Charles for the first, I saw the similarities between her and the room she spends her day in. Organized and old fashioned. Her immaculate clothes were always uniform and matching. She had yellow days, she had orange days, and even some blue and purple. Shirt, heels, hair tie, and socks were always the same color, and never did she wear a skirt above her ankles. I had never met anyone who was so put together. 

The first class period I ever had with her I realized she was an unwavering, insistent embodiment of knowledge. She knew everything, and she wanted us to know everything. I learned quite quickly that she had no care in the world if we wanted to learn or not. If she wanted us to learn, we learned. If we weren’t paying attention, she grabbed our attention, and not always in a pleasant way. 

Over the three years that she was my english teacher, I found she could be stern if she needed to be, which was often. As sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, we were a rowdy, rambunctious group that didn’t care one bit how Mr. Hyde represented the evil, violent side to the amiable Dr. Jekyll. But when Mrs. Charles got up from her cushioned chair and we heard the ominous sound of her heels clacking against the tiled floor, we knew that she was getting irritated, so we would whisper softer, stifle our laughs, and act like we had our heads in a book. But she always knew better. She knew everything. Each and every time  she got up from her cushioned chair, with her clacking heels, we knew it was time to learn. Her tall figure would loom over us, with her hands clasped behind her back, until all traces of laughter were gone and we were focused solely on learning. Just as she liked it.

Mrs. Charles always insisted that we learned, but I never understood how she thought we could learn when we went through the same routine every two weeks: get a book, listen to her read for 90 minutes a day until we finished said book, write a paper based on a prompt she gave us revolving around the book, take a test on the book, then get another book. The monotonous routine got old even before the end of sixth grade, and all I could ever focus on in her class was how boring it was getting. She could always tell when I was losing interest in what we were doing, and she always had the same response. “Pay attention and you will learn. And you will learn in my class.” She left no room for argument, so I just buried my head in the book and tried to look interested. 

When eighth grade graduation came around, I remember the highlight of being done with middle school was not having to go to Mrs. Charles’ english class anymore. I was finally done, and I could move on to another english teacher. But as soon as I got to high school, I found that a lot of what I was learning freshman year I had already learned. That was when it finally clicked in my head; despite the dreadful three years I spent in her class wanting nothing more than to leave the monotony behind, I learned more in that class than I had in any other. I left  with more knowledge than I had walked in with. Mrs. Charles wanted me to learn, and I learned.