From soybean fields grew a teacher.
Kim Bender English teacher and librarian at Humphrey Public School, was inspired to go into teaching because of an essay she wrote and a teacher who saw potential in her.
“When I was a sophomore in high school, my English teacher had us write an essay, and the topic was beauty,” she said. “I wrote my essay on soybean fields. Vacations were really important to my mom and dad, I came from a big family, so we went every other year, and we had driven to Illinois that year, and all the way there and back I just thought how pretty they were with the all the green and the perfect rows, so that’s what I wrote about, and my English teacher, Mr. Jim Buffington, wrote a big paragraph at the end of it, and said, ‘You should think about becoming an English teacher.’ That kind of planted a seed.”
