I haven’t written here in a while, but with school about to start and Bump about to begin kindergarten I’m feeling introspective.

Here’s the thing, as a kid I hated school. I felt trapped, I didn’t understand the social dynamics of the playground, my brain would often wander off into its own worlds to escape the hours of anxiety which school fed me.

I had good teachers, and I learned, but looking back even in first grade I was already in the “bright, but doesn’t apply” category. I started in the “high” group for reading, but was quickly moved to the “medium” group because I just wouldn’t pay attention. This is actually something my early report cards, which I read a few months back, confirm. School was something I survived, nothing more.

I don’t have a moment from K-12 where “everything changed,” hours long blocks where I’m required to be in the same space still fill me with dread. But there were moments where I learned to cope better and become just a tad more functional. And, yes, one of my most import moments involves a teacher.

I already mentioned reading, which is something with which I fell in love throughout my first few years of school. If I got a book I just wanted to be left alone to read it. The problem was, I didn’t like reading books for school. Stuff just didn’t seem as interesting as the books I got at home or from the school library and, if it didn’t interest me, I was out.

And then I ran into Ms. MkKean. I think she was my fourth grade teacher, and I honestly I have no idea if that’s how her name is spelled, but I can tell you one thing:

This teacher terrified me.

I think she was the teacher to whom all the “not up to snuff” students were funneled. It was her job to whip us into shape. She didn’t coddle, she didn’t say “that’s ok,” she didn’t put up with nonsense or people who didn’t pay attention. The rumor in the school was, the year before, she flipped a student’s desk over on them. I never saw that, but she wasn’t adverse to the palm slap on the desk. She was a master desk-slapper.

Now, at this point in my childhood development I was pretty much nothing but nonsense. I was prone to blurting out in class, I didn’t pay attention, I’d loose my homework, my desk looked like a rat’s nest, and assignments were things that happened to other people. Nowadays I’d have been tested long before I bumped into Ms. MkKean, but those tests wouldn’t become common until my college years. In my day I was just “disorganized and under-achieving.”

So you’d think I’d have nothing but horrible memories of this teacher. I was the problem student, bright but unfocused, she was supposed to “set straight.” But the thing is, I have fond memories of Ms. Mkkean because she cracked one of the codes to accessing my love of learning. Ms. MkKean was strict and scary, sure, but she was a teacher.

And, for me, she brought my love of reading to school.

For that grade, which I think was fourth, students were required to read a certain number of books in given time period—much of which we’d do in class. Then they were required to write a paragraph or two about the book and sit down for an interview with Ms. MkKean to go over what we’d read. Now I probably read a ton of books from the library during these periods, but none of them counted for the assignment because I was reading books on things like mythology and we were supposed to be reading novels. My first couple of interviews I walked up to the teacher’s desk with…nothing.

Ms. MkKean could have given up on me. She could have targeted me with the full fury of her desk slap. Instead, she stared at me. I remember that stare, it was one of the most frightening things I’d ever seen. Her thick-rimmed classed didn’t help matters because it made it more intense. But she didn’t lash out at me or call me a failure. I can’t remember if she sent me to the library right at that moment, but I do remember that she wrote a name on a slip of paper and told me to ask the librarian for any books from the series.

The name on the paper was “Danny Dunn.”

At some point, and it must have been soon after that interview because I didn’t lose the paper, I headed to the library and picked up a couple Danny Dunn novels. I was amazed. Here were books where the kids went on adventures—to the bottom of the sea, back in time, and any other number of places. It was like someone took the mythology books I loved so much and made them into novels.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Ms. MkKean had introduced me to the world of Sci-Fi novels. I never missed a reading assignment for her again. I can’t say the same thing about the rest of my K-12 experience, often because I was reading Stephen King or Tom Clancy instead of the class book, but for her I never missed another assignment.

And I’ve never stopped reading.

I never learned how to pay attention in grades K-12, school remained torture, but books were always with me. Novels, role playing game rulebooks, comic books, and fictional technical manuals became the life-preservers to which I clung for survival. I was the weird kid who didn’t fit anywhere, but books were my safe space. And if Ms. MkKean had never written “Danny Dunn” on a slip of paper and handed it to me they may never have been.

So if you’re a teacher and are tempted to think, because some students never quite “shape up,” you never had an impact—don’t be so sure. Perhaps you passed on something that’s helped an under-achieving oddball find their way. And, while they may have never figured out how to thrive in the torture chamber we call K-12 education, you may have helped them discover something better—a love of learning.

A teacher did that for me.

I was never “fixed.” I remain the oddball in the corner at a social gathering who is desperate to not be seen.

I can tell you I’m probably thinking about, or reading, a book.