Dear teacher, you are a magician.

On Thursday I went to visit my mother’s seventh and eighth grade English classes. I talked to them about high school and about college. I watched them write in their journals. I saw them perform scenes from Shakespeare. Many of them wore costumes, and several adopted British accents. At the end of the period, when prompted, rooms full of 12-, 13-, and 14-year-olds waved their hands in the air to announce that they enjoy Shakespeare.

If that isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.

Dear teacher, you don’t just teach facts and figures. You teach passion. You teach love. You teach confidence. You spend time, money, and energy making sure that your students can not only perform to the best of their ability, but also enjoy doing so. Without you, there would be no firefighters, no engineers, no authors, no politicians. Without you, we would not have a world to love because there would be no one to keep pushing the tide.

Dear teacher, you do not get the appreciation you deserve. You are overlooked and underpaid. Administrators sometimes speak as though they know better than you do, even if they haven’t worked with students in a decade. You have to bite your tongue at staff meetings. You are required to use the textbooks, even when you know that you could create a much better curriculum without them. You are masters of making it work. You have to be—you carry the weight of a world on your shoulders.

Dear teacher, you pull your work home with you, like a turtle with memory inside its shell. You let your children pick out six or seven books to read before bed. You let them ask the incessant “Whys?” of childhood because you know it is indicative of wonder. You grade piles of papers, splayed across your bed in swathes of prepubescent fascination with the world. You do not get paid for the extra labor. You do not get paid for a lot of things that people seem to think you do—summer vacations, boxes of notebooks that the school fails to provide, time spent after school offering free tutoring to students who are struggling. These things are out-of-pocket, out-of-heart.

Dear teacher, you matter. You give your students the courage to be who they really are and say what they really think. You let them see the beauty of knowing. You offer them a window into what their world could look like—if they work hard, if they promise, if they dare. You remind them to speak out, stand up, be brave. You stop fights in the hallways while encouraging them to fight for themselves and what they believe in.

This is the future trying to assert its place in the world, trying to figure out what it is and what it wants to be. You take the future in your hands, tend it, encourage it to bloom. Dear teacher, you are a magician, and the world would lack a lot of spark without you.

In honor of the conclusion of my mother’s 30th year as a junior high school teacher. Your labor of love has touched countless lives, and I couldn’t be more proud to have you as a mom (and as my oldest and dearest teacher, too). I love you!