Many teachers are not acknowledged for their uniqueness that is seen by the students they teach. I believe that one of my current teachers should be placed under the category of extraordinary instructor. Mr. Virgil Green of Cleburne High School, Creative Writing, English I, Journalism, and Yearbook teacher, fits the bill for his status as a special teacher. His teaching style is strikingly different from most, his involvement in the school yearbook, and how he has influenced and is loved by many of my friends express how extraordinary he as an instructor is.

Mr. Green has a teaching style that I have not seen by any other teacher which makes me see him as special. Instead of teaching the class and yelling at everyone at the front of the classroom, though he is young and hasn’t reached an age where he detests high-schools students, he gives us a prompt, and asks us to “just write.” Though sometimes we don’t write at all, he doesn’t penalize us for it because he knows well that we as a class will turn in a product the next day when it is due. He understands the life of a teen and frequently will tell us that he “doesn’t want to give us too much work”, knowing that all of our core classes are intent on piling mountains of facts into our brains with binders full of homework. Mr. Green sees that we need breaks from homework so he will give us time to turn in work for an elective class; he knows that some were put into his class against their own will because they simply don’t care about school.

His teaching style makes me look at him as more than a teacher, but an adult that wants to let kids be individuals and extract their inner writer though they don’t care to write; all he wants them to do is try, and try they do. I view him as an editor that happens to work at a school that wants to create future prestigious writers. I personally love to write and because I had him for English I, Due to his teaching style, I have made the choice to be put into his class for an entire year, though it is a half-year class. His teaching style made me want to continue along with him as a teacher because he connects and tries to understand who I am as a writer. He does more than grade, but tells us what he likes or doesn’t like and writes in red pen on the bottom on any fiction story. He doesn’t try to suppress individuality and allows us to write about whatever moves us that goes along with the topic. If a prompt he gives us is hard to write about or at least for one to write about, he will allow us to slightly change the topic to let us produce a product that has been created with drive and passion.

Not only is his style of teaching on a level that is more than a robotic, give- the-lesson, then grade it style; he is also the teacher who runs the yearbook. Given he is the Creative Writing, Journalism, and English teacher, it is befitting that he is the Yearbook educator. Knowing what kind of teacher he is only makes me know how the yearbook should turn out, relatively awesome. I know for a fact that I am going to take yearbook some year during the time I am in high school because of my past experiences with him. I’ve talked with him and he wants to produce a yearbook that is impressive, since we have both seen the failures of past yearbooks. I’ve told him how I want to be a part of his class again so I can continue writing under a teacher that actually understands the viewpoint of teenagers nowadays, my own viewpoint. I want to be a part of helping him in constructing an impressive yearbook. I know that many of my friends want to be in yearbook so we can be together to produce a great book along with our own advising editor to lead us along the way. Though some of my friends have never been in his class before, they’ve been in his study hall time and they have grown to greatly admire him as I do.

Through a unique approach that is more laid back than most, Mr. Green expresses his individualism as an instructor that makes him special, along with letting his students express their own unique writing styles without boundaries. One could say he is serving the community by allowing a generation of students to prosper under their own time and viewpoints. We are the plants he is allowing to prosper by adding a little bit of water and expression of individuality. His style of teaching is vastly different from any other teacher I have seen, and he has influenced me, my writing, and quite frankly, he was the one teacher who made me decide that I love to write. No other teacher was able to do that ever before in my life.