Colburn, Ian

Growing up, I had many teachers that I would consider good at their jobs. I had many
teachers from which I learned enormous amounts of information, but none of them had as much
of an impact on my education as my eleventh grade english teacher, Ms. Nickoloff, did. When I
was in her class, she taught us how to analyze text like no other teacher had before her. She was
incredibly serious about what she taught, but it never felt like she was being too harsh or strict
with her teachings. She seemed to really care about us as students and seemed to care about how
what we learned here would eventually affect our futures. She was incredibly passionate about
what she did.

She would teach us things that helped us see foreshadowing and hidden meanings within
text, where before there were just words. Using what she taught us, I was able to begin properly
analyzing text and start really understanding every aspect of many of the stories I read. Before
those lessons, I would just rush through novels, without stopping to consider what the author
may have been thinking when they wrote a particular line of dialogue, or what the author may
have been alluding to with a certain metaphor that I would have just forgotten about before.

Ms. Nickoloff helped me to understand the real intricacies of novels and helped me to
appreciate the amount of thought that goes into every aspect of a story. Without her teachings, I
would still just breeze through books, enjoying the story, but not appreciating the deeper
meanings, and that knowledge of hidden meanings has changed how I read and write novels for
the rest of my career.