By: Maya Zola

Mrs.Hecox is an eighth grade math/algebra teacher and to me she is the best.  In the beginning of the year I was doing just fine in algebra, then around November I was starting to struggle. 100-80’s went to 70-40’s real quick. I started to give up on the class thinking I was not going to be able to do it. I started not paying attention in class, putting my head down, and not doing homework. If I didn’t know how to do the work I would ask my dad but he was starting to not come home until about 8pm and I wasn’t able to go to tutoring after school because no one would be able to pick me up.

I also didn’t care if I failed the class or anything. I wasn’t trying to fix my grades. Pretty soon Mrs.Hecox asked me what was happening to my work. I told her that i didn’t understand the unit or anything then she says “How about you come to me for cougar time?” I said sure and I got a pass. Later on I was starting to understand the class. I could actually be in the class. But just because I knew what I was doing for that unit doesn’t mean I did for the rest, another difficult unit came around.

I ended up going through the whole cycle again but worse. My 80 in the class went to  50 and I would start showing up late to class. I, again, would be putting my head down in class and not wanting to do anything. I started to think I was stupid and a walking stereo type, a dumb blonde. This spiked a lot of things from the past few months and I slowly got depressed about those things which affected me a lot in my class. One day my parents told me Mrs.Hecox called them and told them about my grades and behavior in class. They said that she was worried about me. My dad said that from now on he would check my homework when he got home. He also said that he would go into work early so he could get off early.

My dad and I started to work on my homework to see what i was doing wrong then within a week or two my grades picked up. From then on I knew what I was doing in algebra. The EOC was right around the corner and everybody was worried about it. Mrs.Hecox had said that we do fine on the test, but I didn’t think I would too great since I had done pretty bad in the past. Mrs.Hecox gave plenty of reviews. We had homework every night. She told us that the test would be 10 times harded than the benchmark was. Every ones worries multiplied.

The day of the EOC comes and I don’t think I’m ready for it. I’m thinking that this is not gonna work out for me. I start my test and it’s really easy. I knew everything on the test. I’m went through it easily. The next day in Mrs.Hecox’s class she says “I wanted to teach y’all ten times more things for the EOC so that you would walk in with more knowledge than what you needed.” Mrs.Hecox tries to teach us more than what we need so that we have extra information. She says that some of the stuff that she shows us is stuff that other algebra students don’t know. Mrs.Hecox has helped everyone when they need it. She truly cares about her students. I have never had a teacher like Mrs.Hecox. To me she is the best.