Teachers and professors are some of the greatest people I know--they care about their students and want to see them succeed in their lives with the lessons they have taught them in the classroom. But sometimes, there is a teacher that seems to be hurting you rather than helping you.

And I have a message to those teachers that brought me down, whether it be in GPA, emotionally, or both...

THANK YOU.

I definitely didn't appreciate feeling stupid in class or the desire to want to give up, but you taught me a few lessons that you may not have realized you were teaching.

You taught me that not everything in life is going to come easy and that I might have to work harder than other students to understand the material and get a decent grade.

You taught me that there will always be people that are not going to sympathize with you when everything seems chaotic in your world. That they won't accept any excuses and they only want to see the work done right... That you're just going to have to work even harder when you don't think you have it in you to do it.

You taught me that failure is a part of the road to success. Maybe I wasn't accepting of it at first, but now I realize that those failures are what made me into who I am today. Those failures might have gotten to me at one point and rattled me to my core, but they don't anymore. If anything, they've polished me and they've allowed me to rise up a better, more refined me.

Lastly, you taught me how to prove the non-believers wrong. You might think I won't meet your expectations or that I will never thrive in this subject area or my career, and maybe you're right, but that can't stop me from trying... Because if you think I am anything less than a passionate, hard-working person, you are WRONG. Maybe I'll be slower than the rest of my peers, but I will get to the top, one way or another. You'll see.

You might have ruined my day, my semester, or my school year, but you will not impede me on my path to a successful future or from becoming the person that I want to be.