Meg Cabot’s entry about her teacher nearly made me cry:

Constance Holland, A Great Teacher

Funny that I think about Meg a LOT when I start to feel beaten down. Her books were rejected LOTS and LOTS of times before she finally got in, and now she’s a best-seller. I wish I could focus harder on people like her instead of wallowing when I get knocked down (again and again and again).

I can’t believe some of you still bother to read my LJ, with all the histrionics and dramatics I put on here.

Anyway, my teacher was Miss Ruth Wheeler. She was my 12th grade AP English teacher. I’d gone to an inner-city high school, and I was an honor’s student. Not a good combination, as the “regular” students hated us. Some of the teachers did too. In one class, we were purposely given grades lower than the non-honors students because we were too “full of ourselves.” Everyone felt that honors students cheated. It was hard for an honors student to be taken seriously because the others didn’t want “us” running the school. We’ve had teachers tell us that we’d never make it through college (Uh, BA in Psychology from Ohio State right here), that we’d be living in the same lower middle class neighborhoods and life styles that we grew up with (granted, I am living paycheck to paycheck now, but I don’t live in fear of gunshots outside of my window anymore), and pretty much said we’d never amount to anything.

We were a classroom of brilliant kids, but some of us (like me) were beaten down by all the negativity. Miss Wheeler would get so mad, practically yelling at us that those other people were wrong. We were going to make something of ourselves. We were going to be special.

She signed my yearbook with: You, more than anyone else in the class, have the potential to become famous. As an author, I hope.

Boy, I hope so too.