Mrs. Shepherd, a proud believer in old-school authority, was the teacher second-graders dreaded to face and fourth-graders wished they could forget. As for us current third-graders with the misfortune of being put in her class? We were stuck with her no-nonsense regime for the year. Only on occasion would she smile, flashing her irritatingly big front teeth, especially when she announced our newest assignment (which, of course, demanded a rough draft printed and a final draft in cursive). The brown in her mousy bob was the only color to contrast the dull turtle-necked dress she wore hidden under a dark gray cardigan. To my 9-year-old self, she could very well have been the walking shadow of the class bookshelf, the back of the classroom where she lurked with watchful eyes.

According to her very esteemed self, Mrs. Shepherd was never in the wrong, and she seemed to take pleasure in attempting to humiliate us into submission. I remember the first time she allowed us to play board games, and to our surprise, she joined in. There were too many people playing Chutes and Ladders, so my well-read friend and I chose Scrabble. My friend played some old and obscure word he had just learned from The Hobbit, putting him solidly in first place, and our teacher froze. “That is not a word,” she declared in her nasally voice. My friend's insistence that it was earned the two of us a 5-minute lecture until, finally, she reached a lull and I reminded her there was an easy way to determine the word’s existence. She then opened a small dictionary, flipped each page deliberately until she reached the one our apparently made-up word would not be found on, and froze again. “I think we’re done with this game,” she said stiffly, sweeping the letter tiles back into their pouch. We found the next day that Scrabble and that dictionary had conveniently disappeared from the classroom. 

On the back wall, amidst plain grammar infographics and college-level rock phase posters, was the behavior chart, on display for all to judge. Every student had a notecard with their name on it, placed in a clear pocket on this chart, sorted into tiers of color: bright green, dull green, you-better-watch-it yellow, and at the very bottom, red, to match our complexions when the shame set in. Mrs. Shepherd didn’t explicitly attach those connotations to the lower colors, but it was certainly implied when she gave the slow, dreadful command to move your card down, making sure the class watched as you did it. The only surefire way to achieve that bright green glory before lunchtime was to have the good fortune of favoritism or to print a beautiful cursive “D.”

In many ways, it is telling that I recall so much about my third-grade teacher in particular when there is so much I’ve forgotten about my times in elementary school. It would be untrue to claim I learned nothing from Mrs. Shepherd, whose strictness forced me to adapt to high standards and push my creativity to the limits, all to achieve a little star scrawled on my paper that pleased my parents. But though I realize now that I did learn valuable lessons from my experience with her, I was not influenced by her as a role model. These lessons came from reflecting on the impressive ways I responded as a 9-year-old kid, who took her treatment of us in stride and found my own ways to overcome. My fondest memory from that dreaded class was secretly saving a boxelder bug with my Scrabble friend, knowing our teacher would throw a fit if she found an insect hidden at our table. And it’s the greatest example of what I taught myself under Mrs. Shepherd's rule: a small act of "rebellion," or rather making the most of a bad situation by doing what is fulfilling, allows you to succeed when authority weighs you down.