佚名/Anonymous
“Sixteen,”I said. I have forgotten the math question my second-grade teacher, Joyce Cooper, asked that day, but I will never forget my answer. As soon as the number left my mouth, the whole class at Smallwood Elementary School in Norfolk, Virginia, started laughing. I felt like the stupidest person in the world.
Mrs. Cooper fxed them with a stern look. Then she said,“We're all here to learn.”
Another time, Mrs. Cooper asked us to write a report about what we hoped to do with our lives. I wrote,“I want to be a teacher like Mrs. Cooper.”
She wrote on my report,“You would make an outstanding teacher because you are determined and you try hard.”I was to carry those words in my heart for the next 27 years.
After I graduated from high school in 1976，I married awonderful man, Ben, a mechanic. Before long, Latonya was born.
We needed every dime just to get by. College and teaching was out of the question. I did, however, wind up with a job in a school—as a janitor's assistant. I cleaned 17 classrooms at Larrymore Elmentary School each day, including Mrs. Cooper's. She had transferred to Larrymore after Smallwood closed down.
I would tell Mrs. Cooper that I still wanted to teach, and she would repeat the words she had written on my report years earlier. But bills always seemed to get in the way.
Then one day in 1986 I thought of my dream, of how badly I wanted to help children. But to do that I needed to arrive in the mornings as a teacher—not in the afternoons to mop up.
I talked it over with Ben and Latonya, and it was settled：I would enroll at Old Dominion University. For seven years I attended classes in the mornings before work. When I got home from work, I studied. On days I had no classes to attend, I worked as a teaching assistant for Mrs. Cooper.
Sometimes I wondered whether I had the strength to make it. When I got my frst failing grade, I talked about quitting. My younger sister Helen refused to hear it.“You want to be a teacher,”she said.“If you stop, you'll never reach your dream.”