"The meanest teacher ever"

Houston Chronicle:

As a girl, Myrtle Nickerson didn't have a dream job.

"I wanted to have a job that was bringing in some kind of money," the 18-year-old recalls, days before her high school graduation. "Where I was staying, we needed it bad."

Where she was staying changed often. Motels, abandoned houses, couches. With her mom, her aunt, her sister, her friend.

Her mom did drugs and drank, Nickerson says, and the teenager isn't sure of her real dad's name. "Everyone knows him as Dog," she says.

A few years after Nickerson had a baby, at age 15, she tried to bring her dad some photographs. That's when she learned he was dead.

"At first, I didn't know how to feel," Nickerson says. "I'm like, 'OK, I'm not going to feel anything 'cause I didn't really know him.' Then it just sank.

"It's like, 'This is your dad. You're trying to get a relationship with your dad, and he's gone. Graduation's about to come up, and your dad can't be there.' "

There was a time when Nickerson didn't expect to get a high school diploma. But this Saturday, the brown-eyed, baby-faced teen will walk across the stage as valedictorian of her class at the Contemporary Learning Center. The alternative school, in the Houston Independent School District, serves students who are two or three years behind grade level.

For Nickerson, academic struggles began in elementary school. She failed third grade and then fourth before transferring to HISD's Foster Elementary, where she met Sylvia Smith. "She was like the meanest teacher ever," Nickerson says. "But she let me know, 'You're gonna survive.' "

Nickerson hopes her youngest sister will get the mean teacher someday.

"Ms. Smith let 'em know like it is: 'This is who you are, but this is who you can become.' That's what she always used to tell me," Nickerson says.

Today, Smith uses Nickerson as an example for her young students. "This baby had it hard," she says, "and if this baby can succeed, you can do the same. It doesn't matter where you've come from."

In sixth grade, Nickerson landed on the honor roll. In seventh grade, too.

"Then I'm like, 'Man, this is boring,' " Nickerson recalls. "No one praised you. No one said 'Good job' when you brought home report cards."

The summer after seventh grade, Nickerson got pregnant....

...

With a baby and a heavy class load, Nickerson struggled to carve time out for homework. Some days, she would work through lunch. Other days, she woke up at 3 a.m., two hours before she had to get her daughter, Pahris, up for day care.

...

"With Myrtle, it was different," Campbell says. "She always tried to schedule appointments for her baby after school. She was always telling me about the baby's diet. If we had a school T-shirt, she says, 'I can't buy that because I have to buy vitamins.' "

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The first time I saw this story I rejected it. But this time I saw what saved her was the "meanest" teacher ever. The teachers I remember the most are the ones who were the most demanding. This was true from grade school all the way to law school. I think that one of the failures of the current school environment is that there are not enough "mean" teachers that demand more of their students. People may think that Marine Corps Drill Sergeants are mean too, but they can make a real difference in someones life and make them a better person than they ever thought they could be.