This is an opinion column

I’m in a writing group made up of people at various stages of learning their craft. Each month there’s a prompt—a subject to write about. This month we are to write about people who have influenced us—just ordinary people.

Back before there was celebrity twitter and movie star snapchat and people who were famous for being famous, we admired ordinary people, those who showed up, did the work, and got the job done.

Maybe there should be an “Ordinary People” month devoted to them. We’d all have to nominate people to be honored.

My nominee would be an ordinary high school English teacher, Mrs. Maryanna Ross. She taught Senior English at Bessemer High School in the early sixties, before the hippie lifestyle and psychedelic music had blown in from California like a storm we’d heard was brewing on the west coast. That was two thousand miles away from Alabama. We’d never heard of the Beat Poets or read Ginsberg or Kerouac. We’d read them later on in college.

We were stuck with the same poets and writers our parents had studied, maybe out of the same text books, but Mrs. Ross made them seem new.

We paid attention in her class. There was no other way to behave. If any student dared to pass a folded-over note to a friend, Mrs. Ross took the note, read it out loud, and tossed it in the trash can. End of problem. She did not put up with foolishness, so we did not give her any. She was tall and dressed fashionably, with high heels, red lipstick, and straight skirts with matching jackets. Think CEO if women had been allowed in boardrooms back then.

She was commanding. She set the rules. We were to read the assignment, come to class, and be prepared for a pop quiz if she thought we needed one. And even her short quizzes were brief essay questions—no multiple choice for her.

For Mrs. Ross, there were no fill-in-the-circle test sheets that asked if Edgar Allen Poe was (a), a poet, (b), a raven, or (c), a player for the Baltimore Ravens. Well, I’m joking, but now we know that students who cram for tests by learning facts and spilling them onto a test page aren’t really learning how to write, to shape the ideas they have into a coherent paper. Mrs. Ross attempted to teach us just that.

She was one of those ordinary people who was doing exactly what she should be doing, not longing for a more glamorous career. Or, if she was, she never indicated that. This was long before coffee cups came with a sarcastic slogan reading, “I went into teaching for the fame and the money.” She was famous in our small town, and she earned a teacher’s salary, which wasn’t much. Yet she stuck it out.

If some PTA group had told her they’d decided to ban one of the books on our assigned list, she would have stared them down and maybe given them a pop quiz on the book they probably hadn’t read. If some parent had called to question her grade of C-on an essay exam we all took, she would have—and did—explain to the complaining parent that students earned their grade; she didn’t give it to them on a sliver plate. End of that discussion.

As a former teacher, I know that teaching has never been easy, but it was easier when teachers didn’t have to “teach to the test” but rather to the student. It was easier when parents supported the teacher and her efforts.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who became a teacher because of the woman who stood in front of the class and began reading the assigned lesson the moment we were seated. She was an ordinary person who shaped young lives and careers. I wish I’d told her how much she shaped mine.