Your Job is to Teach
Ms. Amster was my 7th grade Reading and Writing teacher. I don’t remember the first day of school or the last day of my 7th-grade year. In fact, all I remember is Ms. Amster’s exasperation with everything we did. I use the term “We” to capture the small, Black population in our rural, Central Texas town. To me, it seemed that if we even breathed in too deeply, she would lose it.
The conundrum for me was that I loved Writing and Reading class. At that age, I had pipe dreams of being a writer. Outside of class, I was continually writing prose and poetry. Though my 7th-grade mind didn’t have the vocabulary to explain, I felt that writing gave me autonomy and liberation. As I still do today, I deeply cherished every opportunity to materialize my thoughts in black and white. In fact, I was also a student writer for the school newspaper class during 7th grade. I won the coveted entertainment columnist role for the school newspaper. I picked the task of writing reviews on current movies, so my parents had to take me to the movies each weekend. While my journalism teacher celebrated my writing prowess in Newspaper class, I could earn no more than a C in Ms. Amster’s class. Making matters worst, I hated the course with every fiber of my soul. Ms. Amster’s class was sheer drudgery. Though my parents taught us not to hate, if there was an emotion on the feeling spectrum positioned close enough to hate without dipping…
