Mrs. Sexton

I had a teacher in high school named Marie Sexton. Mrs. Sexton is a Rock Hill legend. She's the teacher who would fail you if you looked at her the wrong way and she told people that. She's the teacher that gave valedictorians their only sub-B grades in their entire public school careers. She's that teacher that told me I would fail her class ten minutes into the first time I ever stepped foot in her classroom because I "projected a negative attitude into her learning environment". She's the teacher who turned me into the writer and literary thinker that I am today. I pretty much skated through English classes up until my sophomore year at Northwestern High School. I read a lot when I was younger and always seemed to have a better grasp at the English language than most kids my age. I had heard for nine years that I was a great writer, and then Mrs. Sexton rocked my world. My first paper received a resounding "F"; I was crushed beyond belief. When I approached Mrs. Sexton about the grade after class, she told me that I couldn't get an "A" in her class by simply throwing big words and complex sentence structures at her. In a nutshell she told me that my writing sucked because I saw the world as a place inhabited by things waiting to be re-defined with bigger and better words, and that to be a good writer you have to define things. I took that to heart, I started to look at the world differently. I think that the book Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton was the first book that I read where I attempted to read more deeply into the story. Why are his pajamas red and not another color? Why did he crash into this type of tree and not this type of tree? These are questions that I asked myself and I found that reading was a whole new ballgame now. Ultimately I made a "D", a fact which kept me from receiving thousands of dollars in scholarships and numerous school district awards, but I feel as though I took something from that class which can never be matched: the ability to find meaning in the words of great authors and thinkers.

Much Love,

Nate