May 6, 2016
Dear Mrs. B,
It was over the summer of 2014 that I met you at a writers’ dinner in Atlas, the restaurant. I was there to accompany my mother, and she introduced you as my future English teacher. At that point, I was incredibly nervous about coming to City High since most of my friends from Northwest would go on to attend West High.
You assured me that City is a great place and told me a lot of nice stories about it– nice things that students do, all that sort of thing. I was most reassured by it.
Later my mom told me that you’re an amazing English teacher, something I’ve learned for myself in the last two years, and that many a great students loved you, yet again something I can understand.
Skip forward a few months. First day of freshman year. I walked in, nervous and quaking. I didn’t know anyone in the class except you. It was like a bubble of silence around me that I was not brave enough to pop, and no one else had any motivation to do so. Well, no one except for you. Just goes to show how much the simple act of saying “hello!” can mean. Definitely made me remember to keep calm and talk to people.
I think the moment things that clinched your awesomeness in my mind was when we were reading Odysseus aloud in class. You were so excited that you were panting and red in the face, and acting out the characters leaping around, and hanging on the sheep’s underbellies, and running away from a giant, bloodthirsty cyclops. After that, almost every class was that exciting.
You’re super adaptable and full of ideas. You make plans, then change them to make things better for us students. You don’t force assignments to go through if they’re unreasonable. You write something down on your prized sticky notes, and change whatever needs changing, and just keep going with the class. Your class is not too easy or too hard. It’s just difficult enough that we students grow, but not enough that we’re all out of our depth with work.
Students are not standard units of potentially downloadable knowledge to you. Scientifically speaking, people who read a lot are more likely to be empathetic. That is no exception for you; each student is someone with whom you have a tight friendship with.
Mrs. B, you are enthusiastic, smart, and accepting, and for that you deserve every appreciation and ‘thank you’ that you get.
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