EDITOR'S NOTE: McKenna Hydrick is a first-year teacher at Silver Bluff High School. She teaches English I and English II to ninth-graders. She is sharing her diary in this column each week.

Throughout my student teaching experiences and my first couple of weeks of teaching, I have been bothered by several overused "educational" phrases teachers and administrators like to use when referring to student success: "You just can't reach them all" and, "You know, if you reach just one student, then you've done your job."

I have heard that statement so much that I slowly started believing it.

I even repeated this statement to my mom the first week of school. I remember the puzzled look on her face. And I, being influenced by this statement, remember telling her, "Yeah, Mom, it's just impossible."

During our independent reading time, I have been reading a book by teacher and author Ron Clark titled The Essential 55. It chronicles his first seven years of teaching by explaining his 55 classroom rules that help develop successful students.

I have been intrigued by this book and its honesty. As I was reading, this passage jumped out at me and completely changed my view about reaching students: "The mentality of achieving 'success' after reaching one child isn't enough. I approach each year with the knowledge that I have only one year to make a life's worth of difference in each child in that classroom, and I give it all I've got" (Page xxvi of the introduction).

Give it all I've got - do I? Will I? I kept thinking about this quote throughout the day. What if my student got one question right out of 120 questions. That's 0.00833 percent.

What would I say to that student? "Did you study? Did you pay attention? Do you care about school at all? How can you do better next time?"

Likewise, if I "reach" one student, am I doing my job?

It's easy to say, "If you reach one student then your year has been successful."

But reaching only one student out of 120 is not an achievement in my eyes. I feel like it's a cop-out phrase teachers use to say that they don't have time to devote to all of the students.

It's very hard to balance teaching, lesson plans, paperwork, makeup work and homebound students. Teachers do have too much paper work and duties, but to me, all of those things are secondary to the primary purpose of teaching, helping students learn about the content and themselves.

If we have the mind-set that only reaching one is enough, we start to justify overlooking the rest, even if it is inadvertent. And, it's not our job to pick and choose which students make our top one list.

We must be fair and consistent with every student.

I'm not trying to sound ideal because I am not sure if every student will have a life change because of my class. But I do think every student will be affected by something in my class.

For some, that might be seeing teachers in a different light. For others it might be scoring high on one test and feeling like a million dollars. Or it might be realizing that the rap music they listen to is really poetry.

But whatever it is, I have recommitted myself (yes, I know, it's only the first four weeks of school) to "give it all I've got," never giving up on any student - by always being open and willing to provide the most engaging, innovative curriculum that I can.