Discovery

This week, I had the pleasure of substitute teaching at my old middle school. I was expecting to see a few teachers that I had, and I did. But I wasn't expecting to be revisited with how much those teachers meant to me.

Some background: I was a really insecure kid in elementary school, and didn't really come into my own until around seventh and eighth grade. But, being between the walls I walked as I found out who I was, I remembered just how much each of my teachers fostered that. Especially Mrs. Stutzman.

In fifth grade, there was an activity we did where we had a picture of a brain, and we had to divide it up into sections that represented each subject in school. The size of each section depended on how interested we were in the subject. I distinctly remember asking my teacher if I needed to have every subject in our diagram, because I wasn't interested in music at all. She said I had to, so I made it as small as could muster, and made it the ugliest color I could find.

Going into middle school, I was disappointed to find that I HAD to pick a music class. Wanting to do as little as possible, I signed up for Piano Lab with Mrs. Stutzman. Now...if I wanted to keep my indifference to music intact, this was absolutely the wrong choice. The first week of class, she taught us the grand scale, and played the entire class through a simple version of Ode To Joy. And I discovered that I could create music. My world was flipped. I didn't care much about science anymore (in elementary school if anyone asked what I wanted to be, it was a scientist). My mom bought me a keyboard from RadioShack, and I would come home from school and just sit down at the keyboard for hours--BEFORE I played Mario, even. Keyboard became the new most important thing, and I quickly excelled in Mrs. Stutzman's class. Then, in seventh grade, there was a three week guitar unit, right after my mom gave me a bass guitar. It whet my appetite a little, but I was still focused on the piano. The next year, after I had started working on bass at home, Mrs. Stutzman let me bring it in during the guitar unit. Then, after the guitar unit wrapped up, she let a handful of us continue the guitar unit in the hallway. For about half of that year, my Piano Lab class consisted of sitting out in the hallway with a few friends playing Blink-182 songs.

And there, in the hallway playing punk rock, I found myself.