Mrs. Sagal isn't just a teacher, she is a mother as well—and a very loving mother. It is so easy to tell how much she cares for her kids because of the way that she lights up anytime she talks about them. 

Mrs. Sagal teaches adventure PE for juniors and seniors at Arrowhead Union High School. I had her at first as a junior and then the next year as well as a senior. She valued everybody's safety over anything. It was one of the main priorities with any activity or sport that we did, if not, the top priority. 

She also made a big effort to learn everyone's name in the class and also have each student know all their classmates' names too. That wasn't just to know everybody's name or to maybe make a new friend, it was to start building trust because in Adventure PE you have to have trust in all of your classmates. After we all knew each other's names, we did some small games like trust falls from different heights to build trust. 

All of the trust-building was mainly for the ropes course and the rock walls. We need a belay team paired with someone who is either climbing the ropes course or rock wall in order for the climber to climb safely and be able to come back to the ground. She taught us how to belay by emphasizing ¨gold standard¨ which pretty much means, perfect. If you weren't getting it down, she would come over and work with you until you got down whatever you were struggling with. 

When I was climbing she would try to push me out of my comfort zone as much as possible in class. The first time I had her for class and we were climbing, I was barely able to get my feet off of the 10 foot ladder before I was ready to come down. Mrs. Sagal came over and tried to get me to go higher. but I couldn´t. I was way too scared. She was making sure that I was pushing my comfort zone, and with heights being my biggest fear—I definitely was pushing my comfort zone. 

Every time in class, all she wanted for me was to get higher up than you did the last class. And that is what I did, that was my only goal every class was to get higher up than I did the last time. After a little while I finally got to the top and that was one of the greatest feelings in the world after all of that time of just climbing up the pole only a little bit or half way then having to come down. The next year my senior year I had so much fun in the class I had to take it again and I just did even better and kept on getting better and better when we climbed in class. 

For the most part I have overcome my fear of heights which I never thought that was possible, and I want to give all the thanks for that to Mrs. Sagal for pushing me every class to be better and she taught me more than just overcoming my fear of heights, she taught me that there is not gonna any growth when you are inside your comfort zone. Once you get out of your comfort zone that is when you'll start seeing growth and progress with whatever it is.