TEXARKANA MAGAZINE
N ine years ago, a very wild, rambunctious 16-year-old me was sitting in Mrs. Jenny Walker’s communications classroom at Texas High School. I was rather obnoxious, dividing my classmates up between ‘royals’ and ‘peasants’ and making plans for how I would go about securing my own MTV reality show, entitled King Bailey of course, because what else would I title it? Through my loudest and lowest days, when I thought I was running the classroom, I can still firmly recall every hallway conversation with Mrs. Walker. Nine times out of ten, I had just been sent out of class by her for doing something dumb, yet she never treated me like I was dumb. She just wanted to gently remind me, “Bailey, you can’t call your classmates peasants.” Since we are celebrating Teacher Appreciation Week in May, I wanted to give a really big THANK YOU to Jenny Walker. She deserves it not just for how she treated (and continues to treat) me, but because of how she treated all her students. I hope we all can look back at our experience growing up in the public school system and remember at least one or maybe even two teachers who saw something in us that we did not see in ourselves. It takes a very special human being to see beauty where things appear on the surface to be ugly, wholeness where there appears to be cracks, and abundance where there seems to be a lack. I can name on one hand the number of special people in my life who have done this for me, and Jenny Walker is included in that count. Throughout my school years, I had the unique privilege of having a great mother, a supportive family, loving friends, and a social, outgoing personality (which I am sure was a challenge for many of my teachers). Other students around me did not grow up afforded the same advantages. Mrs. Walker did not have to say a word because it was evident from her actions alone, even to 16-year-old Bailey, that GOOD EVENING TXK COLUMN BY BAILEY GRAVITT
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