To My High School English Teachers,
Let me first begin by saying that I think you have one of the hardest jobs in the world. You are underpaid and underappreciated by most, but you somehow still show up every day with a passion for the material you teach and love for your students. It takes a very special type of person to teach, and I have so much respect and admiration for you. You have each changed my life in more ways than you probably realize. You fostered my deeply rooted love for literature and writing, and I can honestly say that my experience in your classes has played a major role in shaping me into the person that I am today.
The stories I read in your classes have become a part of me. I fell in love with Robert Frost’s "The Road Not Taken" my freshman year, and have since read it so many times I can recite it by memory. Kate Chopin’s "The Awakening" is still my favorite book, and probably always will be. Sometimes when I cannot fall asleep, Billy Collins’ "Weighing the Dog" is what runs through my mind. Four years after first reading "To Build a Fire," I am still intrigued by the man who froze to death, and I sometimes think about him in the painfully silent moments that fall in between the cracks of my busy life.
Although "Romeo and Juliet" was never my favorite, reading it my sophomore year planted a seed inside of me that has grown into a deep appreciation for Shakespeare. I laugh thinking about how our whole AP Lang class thought we were going to die when we had to read and write essays on "A Model of Christian Charity," but am now so grateful for it because of how many times it has reappeared in my college classes. At the time I didn’t fully understand the significance of stories like "Oedipus" and "The Odyssey," but they served me well when I could explain them to my roommate when she was frantically studying them the night before an exam. I just finished reading "Into the Wild" for the third time, and "Catch-22" has helped me gain a more thorough understanding of the world around me.
I hope that if you ever wonder if what you do matters or feel like you are wasting your time with teaching, you remember how deeply you touch the lives of your students. I thank God that there are teachers like you in the world. You may not have impacted every single one of your students the way that you’ve impacted me, but I am grateful for the knowledge and insight you have bestowed me with. I am not sure where life will take me, but I promise you that I will put it to good use. Maybe one day I will even have the honor of passing it on to students of my own.
Your forever changed student,
Hope Evans