My memory is selective, but I clearly recall two pivotal moments from junior high.

On my first day of seventh grade our bus was late, it had rained, and the lane to our farmhouse was extraordinarily muddy. By the time I climbed into the bus, there was so much goo caked to the bottom of my saddle shoes that I spent the entire trip to town attempting to uncake them.

Unsuccessfully.

Our bus unloaded at Washington Central Junior High, which is now gone, and the already assembled student body turned to stare at the newcomers so late to the event.

The principal beckoned us to find seats down front and I gazed, as if in a trance, at the gauntlet of town kids who would watch my walk of shame as I left clods of the good earth in a trail from the back of the auditorium to the front.

That is my first memory of secondary school.

The other memory is the joy on my father’s face when he returned from an eighth-grade teacher’s conference and said, “Mrs. Brick says you’re going to be a writer.”

He was referring to my English teacher, Esther Brick.

The feeling I experienced was wonder.

I attended Iowa Central after high school.

I made a false start at Iowa State right after that, then dropped out to sing with a rock band.

I sank into a hole from which, with the grace of God, I emerged. When I could see the sun again, I returned to Iowa State and earned a degree in journalism and mass communications.

Then I went East, started a weekly newspaper for a New Jersey company in Connecticut before I was 30. I assumed the editorial leadership at that company’s flagship newspaper, also in Connecticut, when I hit the big 3-0.

Fast forward to my burnout — it doesn’t take long in the journalism profession. I quit, went to England, got booted out for trying to work without the proper paperwork, and came back to the U.S. pretty much broke and broken.

In that condition, I enrolled in the graduate program at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. From Hartford, where I lived, it was about an hour and a half to work in Danbury; then I drove to Middletown, which was about an hour and 15, for class. I drove back to Hartford another, say, hour or so.

One night, when the rest of the class had already left, I broke down in exhausted tears and pleaded with Professor Anne Greene to tell me to stop writing.

“Do you want to be a hairdresser?” she asked.

I was speechless.

“Jane, you are a writer. You have been a writer.”

I did not believe her.

Looking back, I see how crucial a teacher’s support can be. Maybe I didn’t see it when I was weeping in the classroom with Anne Greene, and I know I didn’t see it when Dad shared Mrs. Brick’s kind prediction, but both subtly sustained me, and moved me along, crisis after crisis, question after question, and rejection after rejection.

Eventually, I learned the lesson: No one else could define me. That was my job.

I learned that because of teachers.

We have systems and we have structure, but at the core of that in the classroom are the teachers.

Today, as classes begin, one of them may well shine a light down the tunnel of the future for a young person who wonders where they’re headed.

Let me tell you, there is no charm in being lost in this world.

But there are guides.

They’re called teachers.

Jane Curtis is interim editor of the Daily Freeman-Journal. She is a 2024 Iowa Newspaper Association Master Columnist.