Thank you for inspiring me to join the wide range of intellectuals that shapes the minds of our future children. Thank you for making me want to wake up and come to school each day. I would look forward to your class and would learn so much more than the gray area that the education board requires that you teach us. Thank you for standing up to "the man" and fighting hard against standardized testing because, unlike the rest of the world, you know that we all are different and learn differently and that the little ovals we fill in do not define our knowledge.

Now, this doesn't mean that the rest of my teachers were soul-eating vultures (not all of them, anyways). I enjoyed other classes and didn't hate any of them really (except geometry and gym) but this one class, this one teacher, was special and different no matter what course she was teaching. This teacher was one-of-a-kind. I remember when I received my schedule for freshman year. They had done a night where you rotate through your schedule with your parents and meet all of your teachers. When I came to your class, you introduced yourself as "a professional geek" and that is when I knew immediately that you were going to be different. You helped me learn things I would have no clue about if I just went through a normal economics class. You were the reason I applied to college.

I thought I had it all planned out and was going to work and be fine, but you told me to apply anyway. By late August, I was signing up for classes last-minute and thanking you silently for pushing me to apply that summer. You taught us about credit cards, interest rates and how to save money. But more than anything, you gave us a safe place to talk about everything and anything we needed to or wanted to. We talked about college, we talked about SATs, we talked about home problems and, of course, we talked about boys. Surely, we'd throw in some real course material along the way, but you knew we needed more than a class about inflation, we needed real-world help. You taught me that a job is not always about the money you'll get or the title you receive, but that at the end of the day you are happy.

Thank you for putting in countless hours of work in the classroom and at home and always putting your best foot forward. But most importantly, thank you for making me want to be a teacher just like you.

Love always,

Hopefully a future you