Junior year of high school, I sat down in your creative writing class not expecting much. Your class was going to be the one I didn't have to stress about that year. Writing was something I always loved, and I figured I'd be able to throw a few stories together for class without having to worry about it.

Our class was pretty small. We messed around a lot, got comfortable with each other in that environment, and probably gave you a harder time than we should've. This only made you push us to work harder, but you did this in a way no high school teacher had done with us before.

You didn't want us to have everything in a perfect format. For the most part, you didn't care about word count, spelling, grammar, or anything else the rest of our teachers would look for in our writing. All you cared about was the imagination we put into each story. You pushed every single one of us not to fear creativity in a learning environment.

Looking back, I hated almost every assignment when you gave them to us. It felt like you were trying to find the most ridiculous writing prompts on the internet to irritate our class. But somehow I would always end up with a piece I didn't know I was capable of writing.

I eventually found myself always wanting to top the last thing I wrote for your class. I always wanted to do better. By the end of the school year, I actually valued my own writing. This was something I had never felt before.

I realize now that you weren't actually trying to give us a hard time. You were trying to do something different, and it worked. You took my love for writing and showed me it was actually worth something.

For that, I'll never be able to thank you enough.