An understanding teacher can make a big difference to our school experience. I was lucky in that through my school years I had several. One in particular was my music teacher through years 8 and 9. I hated music lessons and didn't mind telling her, but she always looked out for me. However, there was one music lesson I will always remember.

On this day, some of the autistic kids from a nearby special school were visiting. Due to my timetable coinciding with their music lesson and being autistic myself, I was told to join them instead of joining my normal class. For this lesson, my teacher had moved all tables to the front of the room to make space, and around the edges she had placed drums. As we entered, we were all given a drumstick each and told to stand by a drum.

As we settled, we were told we were going to be learning about time signatures and would perform some beats. She explained how she would stand in the middle, face us, and count the beat. When she pointed at us directly was when we should hit our drum. It took most of the lesson to get us all in sync, but by the end of the lesson we were performing some basic reggae beats, and in my opinion we sounded really good. This lesson that I really didn't want to have any part of ended up making my day. I'm glad it happened.