Life Long Love of Learning

The Fourth Grade is a time when you feel you are one of the big guys! You get to write with pens! Pencils are only used for math class! You have to write everything in cursive. You get more homework. And you have a shorter recess! Well, some things aren't so great. For the first three years I didn't care much one way or the other about school. It was a place to go every day (except in summer). Sometimes it was fun and sometimes it was boring. But when I was in fourth grade, school really started to take on a new dimension for me.

I was in Mrs. Stewart's class. There were two fourth grade classes at my school and I had the tougher of the two. She was much more strict than the other fourth grade teacher and she was much more challenging.

Mrs. Stewart was always very well dressed and wore lots of make-up. She could be very stern but also very loving. Her room looked like a Brazilian jungle! There were plants absolutely everywhere in her classroom. It was room 4-G. The room was the very last one at the end of the hall and our class was usually the last class to be dismissed at the end of the day!

Mrs. Stewart was very picky about handwriting and she gave vocabulary tests every week! I hated studying for them every weekend! I always wished she wouldn't give us so much work to do. After all, we were only nine! And Mrs. Stewart even spoke to us as though we were adults. Not only did I have to study tons of vocabulary every week but I noticed that when talking us as a class she used so many words I had never heard. I felt like I needed a dictionary just to understand what she said!

But Mrs. Stewart did do some things in her classroom that really made a difference, in my opinion. One thing I loved was the fact that she had all the students turn in photos of themselves and she made the bulletin board at the front of the room "Important Person of the Week". And every one got a chance to be the "Important Person of the Week". This meant having your photo at the center of the board, getting to stand at the front of the line each day, and lots of other good stuff. You really got royal treatment for the week. And that was a real self esteem boost!

Mrs. Stewart also did something I used to love when I was in her class. When we would get our assignments returned, they would have the letter grade written big across the page. Well, if it was a C or lower the letter tended to be smaller. But she would write A's and B's really big across the page in red or green ink. And of course those were the days when we still received stickers on our papers! I used to love getting that huge red letter "A" written across the entire page of homework.

Well, there was a boy in my class who was really smart and one day I saw the comments she wrote on an assignment he turned in. I got really jealous of him, because I really liked Mrs. Stewart. So I got a bit competitive. I wanted to have such nice comments written on my papers, too! Well, that was it for me! After that day, I worked harder and harder. I did extra credit work. I studied during my lunch periods. And I put twice the effort into every assignment. Even though at first I did all that work for higher grades and strong praise from my teacher, eventually I began to really love learning. I was amazed at the interesting things I learned when I started doing extra work and putting more time and energy into it. I didn't want to hurry up and just get the assignment completed. I really wanted to understand the material. I began to strive for perfection. My grades grew increasingly higher and I began to get the "A" honor roll.

So what seemed to start out as a personal competition against another student for the teacher's attention really turned into my own struggle to really learn and do good work. And it paid off. I worked harder each year and was really proud of my own advancement. I never wanted to miss a day of school. And I have always appreciated Mrs. Stewart for beginning my life-long love of learning.

-- Carrie T.