000002. - The Woman Who Drove a Blue Tank and Taught Me to Feel Words

November 1, 2025

by Adrian Fernandez Some teachers assign books.Mrs. Fairchild handed out quests.

It was 1995, and I was a ninth grader at Mast Academy — a public magnet school planted right on the edge of Key Biscayne, where the classrooms ended and the ocean began. It would later be honored as a Blue Ribbon School of Excellence, but back then it was this surreal mix of salt air, coral rock, and academic pressure so thick you could taste it.

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Hillary Clinton, the First Lady herself, was supposed to visit that year. The whole school buzzed for weeks, but she canceled at the last minute. It didn’t matter. We already had someone far more interesting walking those halls — a woman named Mrs. Fairchild, who made English class feel like an expedition into the heart of life itself.

She drove this beat-up blue tank of a car — a seventies model that looked like it had survived three hurricanes and a Cold War. The paint was chipped, the muffler coughed like an old man, and the air freshener had given up long ago. It stood out like a sore thumb in the faculty lot, but it suited her. Every penny she didn’t spend fixing that thing went toward travel — Christmas trips to New York, long weekends in Europe, hiking trips somewhere remote. She lived for experience, not appearance.

And that’s exactly how she taught.

In a world of test scores and Scantrons, Mrs. Fairchild was an anomaly — the kind of teacher who believed that stories were living, breathing things. Her classroom wasn’t just about grammar or sentence structure; it was about feeling.

Her reading list that year wasn’t easy to find, especially for someone like me.I was raised by a single mom. We didn’t have money, and the library didn’t stock half the titles she assigned. But I hunted them down anyway. I took the bus to thrift stores, combed through dusty shelves at the Salvation Army, and flipped through milk crates at used bookstores in Coconut Grove until I found them one by one.

Her lineup that year:

• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

• Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years by Sarah and A. Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth

• The Cay by Theodore Taylor

• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card — which I’ll admit, I only pretended to read. Back then I was fighting my own invisible storm, wrestling with depression, and just keeping up felt like climbing Everest.
  

The Cay hit differently, though. It was about survival — a blind man and a boy stranded on an island after a shipwreck. I remember reading about the sea, the sun, the isolation, and thinking how strange it was that fiction could sound like home. The way Taylor described the salt burning your skin and the silence between waves — it felt like our campus, like Key

Biscayne itself was the same island.

And Mrs. Fairchild, she didn’t just teach that book. She lived it with us.

One day she told us to close our textbooks, leave our pencils, and follow her. We walked out the back of the school, down a short path to the beach. The wind smelled like seaweed and salt, and the sand burned our feet through our shoes. She had us pick up coral, describe it, imagine it as something living. Then she pointed out to the water and said, “That’s your setting. Now write something that deserves to exist beside it.”

No one said a word. We just stood there — kids with too many expectations on our shoulders — and realized for the first time that writing wasn’t just about words. It was about paying attention.

Mast was filled with geniuses. The kid on my right would go on to teach nanotechnology. The one on my left would become a CEO. Me? I was just trying not to drown. But Mrs. Fairchild never made me feel small. She made me feel seen.

She’d talk about books like they were passports, tickets to another version of yourself. She said, “The world’s too big to only live in one chapter.” And maybe that’s why she drove that old blue car — so she could keep collecting new chapters instead of payments.

I didn’t get to finish that year. Life got in the way — too many things at home, too much weight for a kid to carry. But I still think about that short time, those few weeks under her wing, the way the sun hit the classroom blinds, the way she spoke about The Cay like it was a metaphor for survival itself.

She taught me that education isn’t just what you remember — it’s what you feel long after you leave.

And that writing — real writing — starts the moment you step outside the classroom and face the tide.

Because some teachers don’t just teach you to read.They teach you to see.

And sometimes, they drive blue tanks, park them crooked, and change your life forever.