Undergraduate / Essay A "My Mean Teacher" [4]

I would appreciate help with this essay. I don't think it's good enough for a college essay but I have worked really hard on it. Please help.

"Topic Essay A-Write an essay in which you tell us about someone who has made an impact on your life and explain how and why this person is important to you."

Topic Essay A
Everybody has somehow been influenced a life in some way. Parents teach how to ride a bike and the choir teacher makes a singing bearable. Those influences can be sometimes welcoming to a person but in my case the person that changed my life significantly caused many negative feelings to overcome me. However, thanks to the most hated teacher of all my school life I have move upward in my education leaving many others behind me.

Everything started my fourth grade year here in the United States, the only things I understood in English where the colors along with other simple expressions that where useless in a classroom full of English speaking kids. To my luck my fourth grade class was mostly taught in Spanish so the struggle for high grades was not much for me. My TAKS results came to be excellent at the end of that school year and my grade average could not be topped, but all that happiness ended as soon as Mrs. Garza walked in the room as a substitute for a summer school teacher. My grades died because of her, my hopes, and even my dream of graduating elementary where destroyed because of the simple fact that she was too stubborn to help me. Everything in Mrs. Garza's class was in English, the lecture, the homework, the class work, asking for help and even asking to go to the restroom had to be done in a language unknown for me. There where many failed tries from my part whenever I got close to asking for help. Mrs. Garza would just stand there looking at me with those frog like looking eyes like if I was speaking to her in some other language unknown to her. Failing grades caused my routine after school to change from going to the park and playing with my friends to staying all afternoon inside my room crying until my eyes dried out.

Mrs. Garza made me feel stupid like nobody else had; I despised her with all my heart and made me wish for horrible things to happen to her. I understood it was not a good thing to wish for your teacher to die but I also did not understand that her bad manners and treatment caused me without noticing to learn what was making my life miserable, the English language. After all those days crying and feeling very insignificant I finally came to see beyond what was written on the chalkboard, I understood what was being said to me after that horrible summer. My spelling got better, my paragraphs got longer and my pronunciation came with not so much of a struggle anymore.

As much as Mrs. Garza tried to make my life miserable and unbearable I am thankful for what she did, her bad temper and lack of Spanish made me learn what now my greatest weapon is, knowing how to speak, write and read in English. My most hated teacher gave me the power to succeed in this country without realizing it. Mrs. Garza, no matter how much despised she is to me, is the person that has influenced my life the most.