What Makes A Teacher Special?

I have often said that of all the courses that I took in Junior High and High School, typing is the one that I use the most each day.  I remember we had electric typewriters for the first time ever.   There were two desks that sat side by side for each row, a typewriter on each desk, electrical outlets running long ways in the room and between each of the two desks.  The girl that sat beside me was very proficient at typing and I was not.  At least once each week I would reach down between the desks just before we had a speed typing test and unplug my classmates typewriter.  The teacher would say, "go" and my classmate would pound away at a dead typewriter.  I found great fun in that.  For some reason, I remember all of that but I don't remember the teacher's name.

Water Color by Wyatt Waters
Wyatt Waters Gallery, 307 Jefferson St, Clinton, MS

A teacher that I do remember well is Mrs. Graham from Peeples Jr. High. She was either my 8th or 9th grade English teacher and she had a great pride in Mississippi writers.  I think she was my teacher the year that Jackson's own Eudora Welty won the Pulitzer Prize.  I remember that she instructed us to go to one of Welty's plays at New Stage Theatre which then was located in an old house.  She told us to dress nicely as we were going to the theatre.  I remember sitting on the uncomfortable pew-like wooden benches,  my hands in my lap, my suit coat overlapping down the side of my hip and onto the homemade cushioned seat.  

Waiting for the play to start, I remember a beautiful girl, coming my way to sit beside me.  Her name and her being was unknown to me but she was an 8th grade boy's dream.  She sat right beside me, her rear end securely mashing the tail of my suit coat onto the cushioned seat.  Stuck in my suit coat, I could not move, but that was fine.  She was fine and she was sitting on the tail of my coat.  

I really don't remember anything about the play except what I have told you.  I never introduced myself or asked the girl what her name was and off she went, as beautiful a mystery leaving as she had been when she arrived to sit beside me.

It is funny what you remember.  What I remember about Mrs. Graham and her class was that she taught us to be proud of being Mississippians.  While our state might rank last in everything good and first in everything bad, there was one category that was good where we ranked first:  Authors/Writers.

She would tell us of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Willie Morris, Richard Wright and so many others.  She taught us that although we might be the most illiterate state in the union, Mississippians can write.  

It was her influence that has made my reading list be primarily Southern authors with a lean towards those from Mississippi.  I look over my Kindle at what I have read this year and the reading list as is follows:

The Voice at the Back Door, by Elizabeth Spencer (Mississippi Author, Mississippi story from 1950's)
The Pecan Man, by Cassie Dandridge Selleck (Florida, on Kindle only)
A Land More Kind Than Home, (N. Carolina, enjoyable book)
The Monarch of Key West, by David Paule (Florida, fun book and not a bad read while at Key West)
All Over But the Shoutin', by Rick Bragg (Alabama, only non-fiction I have read, excellent)
The Glad River, by Will Campbell (Mississippi native, interesting story)
Safe From the Neighbors, by Steve Yarbrough (Mississippi native, a story from the MS Delta)
Boy's Life, by Robert McCammon (Alabama, a book about growing up in 1960's Alabama)
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, by Tom Franklin (Mississippi, an excellent story)
Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, by Susan Gregg Gilmore (Georgia, a fun story)
The Litigators, by John Grisham (Mississippi native, a Grisham book I had not read)
The King of Torts, by John Grisham (Mississippi native, another Grisham lawyer story)
Through the Years with Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter (Georgia, Jimmy and I agree on a lot)


Mrs. Graham now lives in Rossville, Georgia.  She is divorced and is now known to her friends as Nancy Taylor.  To me, she will always be, Mrs. Graham.

For years I have wanted to thank her for the passion that she gave me towards reading books primarily about the South and written by Southerners.  As a Mississippian, it is easy to have an inferiority complex.  Mrs. Graham helped to instill in me a sense of pride in self and state and perhaps most of all, the joy of reading.  And on occasion I dabble in writing, because as a Mississippian, Mrs. Graham told me I could do it.

Thank you to Ms. Nancy Taylor (Mrs. Graham) for taking the job of being my teacher seriously.  It will forever be appreciated.