7:50am Lake Point High School Parking Lot
Samorn Yang quickly swung open the door on her hand me down Subaru Outback narrowly missing Miss Merritt's car. Running late once again, she clumsily squeezed her thick body out of the wagon and hurriedly reached back in to grab her backpack from the passenger's seat. Slinging the backpack over her shoulder she gave her large loose dress a tug, slammed the door shut on her Outback, and began shuffling across the teachers parking lot towards Lake Point High School as fast as her short thick legs could carry her.
Samorn, or Sammy to her colleagues, was in her first year teaching at Lake Point High School and it was going... Well, it wasn't going quite how Sammy had planned for things to go. Being her first full time teaching position after graduating from a well-respected private college, Sammy had envisioned her first year of teaching to be like a cross between Dead Poet's Society and School of Rock. She wanted to be a role model for her students and inspire them to do great things, but it turns out that life rarely plays out like the movies. The first couple weeks of the school year had been promising, but as the semester progressed a cloud of apathy seemed to descend upon her English classroom. By the midway point of the semester Sammy had felt like she had lost the classroom and no matter what she tried she couldn't get the students to reengaged with her or the subject matter.
After spending her holiday break on YouTube brain storming new ways engage her students, Sammy dove head first into her 2nd semester of teaching. Unfortunately for Sammy, she had dove head first into the shallow end of the proverbial pool. Her increased enthusiasm, corny jokes, and out of touch attempts to relate to her students didn't go over well with the hormone riddled 15 and 16 year old's that filled her classroom, and after only a couple of weeks the apathy of her students had hit record levels. By the time spring break had hit Sammy's struggles in the classroom had made her feel completely inadequate, but her pride alone had prevented her from admitting her struggles.
Sammy's first taste of failure was a bitter pill to swallow and it was exacerbated by the fact that her classroom was right next to Stephen Gregg's government classroom. At the start of the school year Sammy had a fairly neutral opinion of Stephen, but as the semester drug her opinion of him slowly went downhill. Sammy always told herself it was a mixture of things that had caused her to develop animosity towards Stephen, but envy was the main factor behind her bitterness. It irked Sammy to see Stephen so effortlessly succeed in the classroom and with his students. It helped to make her own personal struggles sting even more. The cherry of top of her spite filled cupcake was when Stephen had offered to mentor her after he had noticed her struggles as a first year teacher. Being too prideful to accept the help, Sammy flippantly turned down Stephen's offer.
