Mrs. T, a lifelong lackey to laziness, was a name on the same level as Voldemort, the boredom associated with her attached itself to you as if it was a spell. Her ability to teach was only outweighed by her ability to bore you. She was as tall as she was interesting, the kind of teacher that stuck with her daily routine even if it were to lead to her demise. She watched everyone trudge into her classroom and expected them to know all of the math that she was going to go over as if it was all review; laziness meant a failing grade.

Maybe the daily warm-up was the source of my learning, or maybe it was me searching for the answer within google. Either way, the endless warm-ups that she had on standby acted like an army ready to sacrifice themselves. Some Days she would give us an exit ticket, but it was really the warmup for the next day. Her computer that held all of them became a priceless artifact in her eyes, it was the easy way out, the lazy way out. It was the end of all of her problems and the start of all of mine.

Over the course of the year, while other teachers were keeping up with student progression, she was still struggling to keep up with the curriculum. I remember asking her if we were a little behind because some of my friends with different teachers were going over topics I haven't ever heard of, nevertheless her response would always be the same. "We are still on schedule". She would say this with full confidence as I walked into the classroom every day surrounded by posters that contained symbols and topics that were completely obscure to me. Everyday class would start the same, with a warm-up that looked like it was written in a foreign language, and a teacher that would reassure us this was part of the lesson from yesterday.

Mrs. T influenced me in ways that I never thought could happen in a 6th-grade math class. She is the reason I am able to look at a math problem and solve and understand it in a fraction of the time previously. I can say that I definitely did not learn anything math related throughout my whole 6th-grade year, the year was spent doing math that nobody knew how to do except for the qualified teacher. But, looking back now I realize that Mrs. T. helped me in all of my math classes after 6th grade. She is the reason I have come to love math. She taught me that if I put my mind to it, I can solve almost anything.