Mr. Knox, a former math teacher of mine, was the most threatening teacher I’ve ever had. He taught the class the way he thought was perfect, with all of our prior knowledge being thrown out the window to learn new techniques for the same lessons we learned years prior. Mr Knox was probably in his 60’s. He was very tall and slim and his short hair was starting to become grey. He would always dress professionally, wearing a different patterned tie everyday, black pants, and a light blue button up shirt. When you walked in the hallway you could perfectly hear his shoes clacking against the floor and when you walked past him it was almost as if a gust of wind had just hit you. His classroom was well organized and had math formulas lining the walls. The room was colorless and there was not a single day it wasn’t freezing in there. Lining the top of the white board were all of the awards he had received for teaching being proudly shown off to the class. 

Mr. Knox had strict policies on everything. We were told phones go in your backpack, which mostly everyone did because they were scared of what would happen if they didn’t, and he gave no warnings before giving it to the principal. He was the type of teacher that everyone despises who would call on you if he noticed you were doing anything besides giving your attention to him. The tests were hard and we had one almost weekly. A lot of times concerned parents would email him about their children not being prepared for tests or not understanding the homework and he didn’t care and continued on with his lesson plans. Reassessments were not an option because he stated you aren’t allowed to do it in college, missing assignments were almost never allowed to be turned in, and if you weren’t there on the test day you should expect to be sternly talked to the next time you come in class and make up the test as soon as possible only if he allowed you to. 

He would recall a lot, “When I was in college, I had my grandmother's funeral and my final exam on the same day and my professor wouldn’t let me make it up later so I didn’t attend her funeral.” 

Homework felt as if it was required to live and if he somehow could tell that you didn’t complete it he was not afraid to call you out in front of everyone. Every single night, he demanded us to do over an hour of worksheets and math problems from the huge textbook, sometimes taking most of us close to two hours if we didn’t understand the lesson, and of course homework answers were never provided.  Students have gone to the principal to report about us not getting the homework answers, and the principal could do nothing about it, there was no policy or rule saying that he had to. It left kids lost and not knowing if they were doing anything right, but he insisted that we should all know the material on our own. We walked into the class every single day as he sat quietly with the enormous textbook open on his desk and grabbed our own copy out so that we could start to reference it. He would read and praise it as if it was The Bible. Carrying that large textbook that was over 600 pages in my backpack gave me back pain and felt as if it was 50 pounds. 

Although I disliked Mr. Knox and was scared of him most days, I can not deny that he has impacted my worth ethic when it comes to school. He taught that math class only the way he thought was perfect and embarrassment was meant to only push us further into understanding the lessons, which obviously didn’t work for most of us. But he still helped me learn that there is more to a class than the grade and that if you really want to learn and be good at something you need to take all of the steps and time to do so. Real learning is time-consuming and full of effort. He got the best out of every student and he was harsh because he cared about our education.