Ms. Choi was the first teacher I ever had a crush on.

She was my eighth-grade language arts teacher, twenty-six years old, with shoulder-length brown hair and a penchant for walking barefoot around the classroom. She had a warm, cheery personality coupled with the kind of approachability not usually found in teachers: she genuinely cared about her students, but she also came off as a social butterfly who always knew about the latest trends. Back then, Nirvana was the number-one band, Clueless was the number-one movie, and The X-Files--Ms. Choi's favorite--was the number-one television show.

Then, as now, I was quiet and shy to the point of awkwardness and often given to blushing, especially when Ms. Choi tried to get me to talk to girls--"You should say hi to Ashleigh Anderson--she really likes you." Ms. Choi had an influence that made her "cool teacher" status well-deserved, but more than that, she was also the one who fed me a steady diet of books to read. She had a small bookshelf behind her desk and I would often ask her, in my small, high-pitched voice, if I could borrow one of them. She happily lent me Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret--a book that, after finishing it, we both agreed was more for girls than for boys--and William Golding's Lord of the Flies. I can't say that I completely understood Lord of the Flies, and Ms. Choi warned me that it was geared more towards high school students, but that didn't put me off. Teachers had given me some tests the previous year and found that I was already reading at the college level.

It was also Ms. Choi who awakened my inner writer. During a short story unit, during which I read Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" and Ambrose Bierce's "An Incident at Owl Creek Bridge" for the first time, Ms. Choi had the class write his or her own short story as part of the final grade. 12 Monkeys was my favorite movie back then, so I wrote a story involving time travel, nuclear holocaust, and a group of Nazis attempting to transport Adolf Hitler from the 1940s to some point in the distant future. I got an A for that story.

Years later--I was probably sixteen or seventeen--I bumped into Ms. Washington, who had been my eighth-grade social studies teacher (and, not surprisingly, another one of my favorites). We spoke for a bit and she informed that Ms. Choi was teaching high school and that she used my first short story to show her students "how it's done."

I don't claim to know what I was doing when I wrote it, nor do I remember much about that story, but since it was for Ms. Choi, I think I can say, with confidence, that I gave it my best effort.

Comments

[Stephen]

Sadly there were no Ms Chois at my school.

PS Is 'The After Dinner Payback' no more? I like this new blog. It's more the look and feel of the old Bibliosphere.

[Brandon]

Stephen: The Ms. Chois of the world are hard to come by. I was lucky enough to have had a number of teachers like her: Mr. Zuccarelli, my fourth- and fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Williamson, my tenth- and eleventh-grade English/journalism teacher, and Ms. Jones, my ninth-grade English/journalism teacher, among others.

And yes, The After-Dinner Payback will be laid to rest. I figured that, since I've been blogging steadily for almost a year, it's something I'll be doing for the long-term, so I had no qualms about buying my own domain and upgrading to a paid blog service. I also couldn't figure out how to set up my blog on WordPress, and TypePad seemed to offer the easiest way for me to host my domain, so here I am. The interface can be a headache at times, but so far, I definitely think TypePad is worth paying for.

And thanks for the compliment! I've decided that I like the simpler layouts the best, especially on the blogs I read, so I decided not to clutter it with sidebar junk. And, of course, this being a book blog, I'd always wanted a "Book-something" kind of title, but I'd never been able to think of anything I liked. I know I move every couple of months, but this will be the last move. I've quite happy with everything now.