One of my favourite authors, John Green, says that he does not believe in epiphanies, because "he’s never had a blinding light awakening that lasted for more than a few days," and on that, we disagree. My epiphanies— big and small— most often come from my teachers. An epiphany, as defined by Oxford dictionary—because it is the only dictionary that I am allowed to use at the request of my teacher Mr. Brown, who you will read more about in a few lines— is "a moment of sudden and great revelation or realization." I’m lucky to have had these teachers for many reasons, one of which is that I have had epiphanies from all of them. To Mr. Baganz, Mrs. Leiphart, Mr. Pittman, Chloe, and Mr. Brown, thank you. This is a thank you owed to my favourite teachers.

Mr. Baganz, my fifth grade teacher, taught me how to be a functioning member of society. I mean that literally, in that, before I met him, I was disgusting. It was not on purpose, or due to poor home training, I was simply too disorganised to clean up the issues in my mental, physical, and digital spaces. In my whole Cedar career before Mr. B (as he was affectionately called by the class), teachers would write in my report cards that I was very bright, but too disorganised to properly organise my thoughts and ideas, even in speech. The ideas were there, they were good, but they didn't make sense in context. Similarly, my physical organisation skills were so poor that I could not even find where I put my snacks—something very important to me. This was only for them to be rediscovered, in the most vile way, at a later date. Mr. B unfortunately was tasked with fixing these flaws before I entered secondary school or I would "fail immediately." My mother likes to say that "you don’t lose mediocre students, you lose bright ones". One reason for this, as in my case, is that students miss the development of integral skills at integral times.

Luckily for me, the right teacher was placed in my life at the right time to engineer a solution to my long standing problem. First, he taught me how to organise my thoughts. He started me off with the five paragraph essay using the "Point-Evidence-Reasoning" model. For anyone unfamiliar with that style of essay writing, you start all of your body paragraphs with a main idea, the point. The point is followed by supporting research, the evidence. Then, the paragraph is closed with an explanation of why the evidence is relevant, the reasoning. I failed at writing these many times, but once I got this skill down, I really had it down. Not only do I organise my essays like this, I now organise my thoughts like this. Before this training, I only really knew how to make my point. This skill was required by my mother, so if I had an issue, she would know what was wrong. I loosely knew how to gather evidence, but not well. And though my reasoning skills were strong because of round table discussions with my family, they were not well connected to the other skills. Mr. B tied all of these skills together, this is when I had my first epiphany.

My epiphany occurred when, as practice for setting my new skills, I was journaling about my day. The epiphany was that I could clearly and concisely reason through issues to find solutions to them. After teaching me how to organise my thoughts and showing me how to form basic organisational structures, my organisational skills fell into place. Am I still a little messy? Yes, my mother can attest to that. But now, I know how to create structures that really work for me. Thank you Mr. B for teaching me these skills, without you I would not have this blog, or my grades, or three best speaker debate awards, because you taught me how to organise my life and how to organise myself.

The next epiphany prompting teacher I had Mrs. Leiphart. Mrs. Leiphart is what I would consider the human version of a hug and a slap on the wrist. She is quite strict about talking out of turn, but exudes a warmth that rivals global warming. Most of her classes were sessions where we worked independently and then in open discussion. I loved this model. I love talking and, having recently learned how to organise my thoughts, I liked having time to myself to record how I felt about a subject matter. This is a model that I thrive in, which showed me what me really thriving looks like for me. In Mrs. Leiphart’s class, for the first time in a long time, I understood everything in the lesson plan. Sadly, before Mrs Leiphart, the concept of understanding every single thing being taught to me was something that I didn’t even know existed outside of my home environment. Mrs. Leiphart taught me math and english. As someone who had struggled (and still struggles) with math since the third grade, I did not know what it felt like to understand everything in that class. I barely knew how to understand things in relation to numbers. What might be even scarier is that, before Mrs. Leiphart, I did not know that I was lacking an understanding. With her I had the epiphany that I was missing information because I hadn’t understood it when it was first taught to me. With this knowledge I gained the skill of highlighting when I had not understood something, and the skill of self-advocating to have that lesson taught to me in a different way.

You might think that such a valuable gift would be enough from one person, but she gave me a second gift. That gift was CTY. The Center for Talented Youth, or CTY for short, is one of the world’s leading summer gifted programs. CTY, created and hosted by John Hopkins University, is a place for nerds to be unabashedly excited about learning, and for gifted students to challenge themselves with college courses taught by phenomenal professors. Mrs. Leiphart had a feeling that I would be a good pick for the program, and I thank my lucky stars every day that she tested me for it. At CTY, I met one of my best friends (Jen who you’ve probably already read about elsewhere on this blog), I met future world leaders, and I saw for the first time who my competitors are on the world stage. I met students who played piano like Mozart, who debated the merits of Nihilism for fun, and who had perfect ACT scores at age 16. I even met a student who very kindly explained Einstein’s Theories of General and Special Relativity to me over lunch. This would not have been possible if Mrs. Leiphart hadn’t been my teacher. Thank you Mrs. Leiphart.

Unlike the other teachers on this list, I did not have the next two teachers while in the British Virgin Islands at Cedar International.

I had Mr. Pittman on my forced year abroad after Hurricane Irma. He was the first teacher I met at Decatur Highschool and made quite an impression by flinging a white board marker across his classroom at a sleeping student. He taught me both the classes Civics and Economics, believing that every American should have an understanding of how their government works.

I had Mr. Pittman everyday except Wednesdays and he made coming to school a joy. He has a dark sense of humour (like myself), and talks to his students like adults. I liked Civics in his class but what I really loved was economics. As you know, I am not a numbers person at all. That makes what Mr. Pittman did a small miracle. He made the graphs, the numbers, and the foundational concepts of economics graspable to my, at that time, mathematically illiterate brain. He introduced me to numbers that I actually understood and that I love so much that I would like to keep learning about them in the future.

In addition to the wonderful classes, I loved our post-class conversations. I would ask questions and get hilarious, enlightening, and memorable answers explaining economics and policy decisions. Thank you Mr. Pittman.

Another teacher who made math understandable to me was Chloe. I had Chloe as a professor for my summer course at Columbia in 2018. She taught a class called "Thinking and Problem Solving: Math in the Real World." I applied for the course thinking that it would be a good transition into IB SL Mathematics. Unbeknownst to me, an unofficial prerequisite for this course was Calculus. Most of my classmates flew in from Asia and all of them had a way stronger grasp of mathematics than I did. My classmates flew through the questions like Usain Bolt while I was left fumbling and trying to figure out what the questions meant. After a particularly brutal day, when my classmates for a group work session refused to speak to me in english, I stayed back after class to ask Chloe about the maths question. Before I could even get the words out of my mouth, however, I started started crying. Shocked, Chloe asked me why and I explained my woes. She then taught about Imposter Syndrome. Imposter Syndrome is a condition that many academics suffer from. It is felt when a person walks into a room, and though they are qualified to be there, they feel under-qualified, like an "imposter". From then on, I felt a little bit better in her class and in math environments in general.

She prompted the epiphany that if I applied for a program, and I got in, then I belong there and I will succeed. The new found confidence from our pow-pow allowed me to catch up in class and finish the course in its entirety. I’m still borrowing from that confidence in SL mathematics, and my grade has jumped from a C to an A this semester. Thank you Chloe!

The last epiphany prompting teacher that I am going to write about is Mr. Brown. He is actually the inspiration for this post. If you know Mr. Brown, you know that, to quote my mother, "he pushes hard". He is the kind of teacher that will not mark your paper if it has a spelling error, as it "shows that you don’t care". He is the kind of teacher that will not mark a paper if it is not written in perfect MLA, since, at this point in our academics, we should know better. I don’t think I have ever worked as hard in any class as I’ve worked in his class. So, naturally, I recently had an english class induced meltdown. This is only sort of unusual. With Mr. Brown as my teacher I have had many meltdowns. This one was only special because it was big. It was because I found out that he would be leaving my school and that I could no longer have him as a teacher.

Mr. Brown is a teacher who pushes me harder than I push myself. As a bit of a perfectionist, this took some getting used to. At first, I thought he was mean. Then, I thought he must be a sadist. Later, I realised that he was pushing me to be the best student that I can be. He taught me that before I turn in any paper it has to be the cleanest piece of writing that I am capable of producing. In his class, I had to defend my values, which I thought were common place, on a regular basis. He taught me how to defend my values from every angle and question them when new perspectives challenge them.

Mr Brown is what I’ve heard described as a "straight shooter". In our clases, he very bluntly explains why he thinks something is illogical, and feelings are taken out of the equation. In discussions of any type, arguments have to be water tight, logically speaking. If they are not, then he and the other logicians of the world will not listen. As such, he highlights errors in my reasoning from every conceivable direction. As an award winning debater, for that I am thankful.

The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, beautifully explains the dangers of the hyper-liberalisation of university campuses (a concern shared by Mr. Brown). The book explains that children, university students, and academic disciplines need to be informed by a mixture of conservative, moderate and liberal voices. If not, the products of all that hard work will unwittingly disperse rhetoric that promotes unhealthy patterns of thinking and less reliable results. This is due to the fact that the process of "Institutionalised Disconfirmation"—the method by which academics pinpoint and eliminate the flaws in papers—requires "a diversity of view points" to properly function and "increase the reliability of claims". On a much smaller scale, Mr. Brown has been my in-school institutionalized disconfirmation for a long time. His strong conservative leaning has strengthened the quality of my ideas and the breadth of my beliefs. Though my mother tells me that the lessons he’s taught me will stay with me forever, his inclass debates providing that vital disconfirmation, which have on many occasions made my day, will be sorely missed.

The last thing he’s teaching me, another integral ingredient to this blog, is how to write. Mr. Brown expounds in his class that in college "you need to know how to think and how write." In previous lines you heard about who taught me how to think, Mr. Brown is the teacher who is teaching me how to write. For that I am eternally grateful. Thank you Mr. Brown.

In closing, I have had some amazing teachers. They hail from over place and teach in many different ways. The teachers in this post, are the ones who made the biggest impact on me. My grandmother has always tells me that when someone does something nice for you, you say thank you, even if you have to go out of your way to do it. Mr. B, Mrs. Leiphart, Mr. Pittman, Chloe, and Mr. Brown, Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

P.S. for more from that’s so Kathlyn please email thatssokathlyn@gmail.com