A TEACHER once wrote in my report card, 'Madeline can be as deep as an ocean, and as shallow as a bubbling stream.'
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I didn't know whether to be flattered or entirely offended, but despite our arguments over my propensity to disrupt the entire class, Mrs Smythe-Davies was one of my favourites.
She taught English, wore signature blood red lipstick and carried a water bottle everywhere to prevent another kidney stone she would recount like a Vietnam War story.
One time I threw a dictionary out the window and she took my word for it when I told her the wind blew it out.
She also really liked that random E-Harmony video of the woman who wanted to 'Hug Every Cat' that went viral in 2011.
When you spend six hours a week in the same room together, eventually you get to know each other's quirks.
I have Mrs Smythe-Davies to thank for a lot of my early learnings about metaphors, similes and hyperbole.
I keep them in a tool kit that I wield in my job when an adjective just isn't enough to do the trick. But, it's what we learn outside the curriculum from these impossibly patient people that's the most important.
Instead of laughing at the girl reading aloud in class that stumbled over almost every word of Shakespeare's Othello, we were encouraged to applaud when she got to the end. We learned that there's a difference between being critical of each other's work and being unkind.
Really, she was just another person trying to get through life.
But, it's the teachers that show that bit of emotion that quickly become the class favourite, because they make you care about paying attention.
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It's almost Education Week and a time to celebrate all those teachers who put in the extra hours without thanks, who taught us not just the syllabus but helped shaped us into little adults, who eventually go on to be big adults that are hopefully all the better for it.
Plus, she taught me to drink lots of water. And I've never had a kidney stone.
Madeline Link is an ACM journalist