Dear English Teacher,

Now that it’s been a few years since I’ve been out of high school, I’ve had a lot of time to think about and reflect on what I learned while in high school. Since high school my writing has matured as have I. Upon thinking about how much everything has changed, I have realized that English teachers are the teachers that know their students the most. They are the ones who read all of the things you write, good or bad they read them all. They rarely get a "thank you" for that. So thank you for dealing with my awful writing that I did the night before it was due and said “good enough” right before I printed it out to go to bed.

Thank you for taking away my love for writing. And thank you for giving it back to me, improved. Seeing the red pen all over my papers was what discouraged me but seeing the red pen and how I can improve is what gave me the motivation to push myself to write better. Thank you for believing in my writing and that I could do better. When I look back, I should not have been discouraged by the multitude of colored pens that corrected my paper. I should have taken advantage of how you were willing to help me.

In college, writing a ten-page paper in one night seems like no problem now compared to the one page papers I wrote for your classes in one week. Writing a one page paper then seemed like the impossible, five pages were impossible and only left for final papers. Thanks to you, I have been able to write those ten-page reports or papers in one night and it seems as easy as a paragraph back in high school.

The thing I miss the most about your class was the bond I shared with each one of you. As you read all of my papers you also got to know me better. Discussing my papers and what they actually meant would always be a way for you to ask me questions to dig deeper into the meaning of what I was writing. You got to know me through my writing and there is no other bond than between a student and their English teacher.

Without all of my high school English teachers, I would not be here writing articles weekly for my school. English teachers do not get enough thanks. Instead, they get a dirty look because the student got a bad grade on a paper.

With Many Thanks,

Your Former Student.