Hi everyone! I hope you’re all well. It’s Wednesday, and it’s time for another post in the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge hosted by Long and Short Reviews. If you would like to partake in the challenge, you can find the list of topics for 2026 here, and if you would like to read what others had to say about today’s topic, you can do so here.

A Story About My Best Teacher

I went through a lot as a youngster. I was bullied for much of my school life, and to try to fit in or to make the “cool” kids like me, I would deliberately act out and misbehave in class to try to make them laugh or to show I was just as “cool” as they were. Looking back now, though, I wasn’t cool at all. And neither were they! They were a bunch of asshats who thought they were better than everyone else.

Anyway, in year 10 (I was 15), we got a new English teacher, called Miss Wood, and for the first few weeks, I made her life very difficult. She was a newly qualified teacher, and I took it upon myself to disrupt her class, which sometimes won me some giggles from the aforementioned asshats but mostly just made me feel terribly guilty. One day, she was telling me off for something, and I put my hands over my ears and yelled: “Sorry, I can’t hear a word you’re saying!” So, she sent me out into the corridor ( a common punishment at my school).

After a good fifteen minutes, she came out and said, “We can’t keep going on this way, you know. I won’t be able to teach you, and you won’t learn all the incredible things from the incredible books we’re going to read.”
I said nothing, and she went to head back into the classroom, but she paused and came back to me.

“You know what?” she said, “in the words of my favourite heroine, ‘the hardest thing in this world is to live in it’” She smiled, then added, “but it’s also the most rewarding thing.”

“Is that part of a Buffy quote?” I asked.
“You like Buffy?”
“I’m obsessed with that show,” I said, and we spent the next ten minutes talking about how Buffy had to dig herself out of her own grave and about the upcoming musical episode.”

She had a brother who lived in the US, who’d send her VHS tapes he’d recorded of the series—and she’d tell me about what I had in store for when it aired over here (though she refused to give me any spoilers, no matter how much I tried to get her to).

From that moment on, I saw her as a human being, not some robot spewing Shakespeare at me for three hours a week. When I started listening, I started to enjoy the lessons and actually learned things.

Miss Wood also encouraged me when I’d write, and she’d be excited to read them, offering me advice on grammar and structure. Without her pushing me to finish stories or poems, I don’t know if I’d still be writing today. She was definitely my favourite teacher.

Well, that’s post 23!

As always, thanks so much for reading my post. It means a lot.

Until next time,

George

© 2026 GLT

Categories: life, Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge

Tags: Buffy, challenge, childhood, teachers, Wednesday, Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge