I might have hated you while I was taking your class. I admit it. It's hard to like someone when you pull an all-nighter trying to perfect a paper only to see it marked up with red all over when it's handed back. It's hard to appreciate someone when they gave you hours of work to do every night, sometimes every day. It's hard to thank someone who doesn't hand out A's like every other teacher. It's hard to have a good time learning when your ever precious GPA is taking a bigger hit than all your friends in your neighboring classes.
But the year ends, and your students are relieved the endless work/studying is done with. And then you start to notice something interesting. In the next level of the course, everyone who took the class with you was miles ahead of all the other kids. Our AP and SAT scores were always higher in your subject. We felt like the class was a breeze. Why? Because you prepared us to be critical thinkers, a skill that's currently lacking in modern society.
A lot of administrators push for A's and B's to make the average GPA look better for the school when it comes to rankings/potential funding. But not you. You cared enough about your students to push them, even if we pushed back. You cared enough to put hours and hours into your lessons plans, hours into studying effective learn techniques, and hours into grading the thousands of assignments we all received. We both know that the students don't want to do them, and the teachers sure as hell don't want to be grading them, but you cared enough about our intellect that you put in the sleepless nights too. We never thanked you for having just as many late nights as we did.
Your expectations were never vague. Though they may have been rigorous we always knew what you expected of us. And, yes, it was a lot, but training your brain is a lot like training for a 5K. If you only run one mile every day because bumping your distance up to two is "too hard", you're never going to improve. And when it comes time to run that 5K? You'll be out of breath while everyone else blows past you. It's the same in the academic/real-world job world. The kids who purposely schedule the "easy" teachers are miles behind the kids you teach when it comes to solving problems in the real world. When it comes down to showing some skill, they won't be able to measure up.
You taught me so much more than science/English/math: you taught me to enjoy pushing myself. You forced me to work harder long enough for me to see the pay-off. And it was well worth it. You taught me that nothing worthwhile comes easy. You aren't just teaching a subject; you are teaching the next generation to be driven, hard-working individuals.
Your tough love shows that you care more about your students than the other teachers. Nothing bothers me more than when a teacher doesn't care about their job. When I go to office hours, and an overworked grad student offers little to no advice or tells me "I'm just fine", I see flames. You would never have done that. If I had a question or wasn't doing up to par, you would work with me, give me wonderful feedback and constructive criticism.
So thank you. Thank you for making me a better person.
And thank you for teaching me so much more than "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell"
