I really enjoy school. Since I was a little kid, I was always the student who was counting down the summer days until school let back in because I was excited.

It's weird, I know. But I was blessed with the desire to learn and expand my knowledge, as well as teachers who wanted to help me do so. I always responded well to authority in a classroom setting, and that has brought many advantages my way when it comes to school.

As I've gotten older, however, I've realized that not every teacher wants to help me learn as much as other teachers do. For some of them, the main goal is to push as much content on me as possible in the time given.

While I understand that this is necessary at times due to recent requirements with standardized and government testing, it sometimes made school unbearable. It was especially hard to deal with later in high school.

I'm a firm believer that educators should be teaching because they want to help us learn, not because they love their subject so much that they want to talk about it all the time.

As myself and many others have seen, this creates teachers that have unrealistic expectations, are impersonal and don't have good teacher/student relationships inside or outside of the classroom.

As I graduated high school this week, I dealt with many lasts. Walking out of my French classroom for the very last time, after going there almost every day for three years, was especially hard. It took everything in me to actually take the steps out of the door.

My French teacher dealt with my best and worst days. She chaperoned prom, listened whenever I had any boy troubles and even traveled to Europe with me between my junior and senior years of high school.

We spent our last class with her hanging out, reminiscing together and signing yearbooks.

I used to go to her classroom during my study halls, just to say hi. Because even if I just sat at the back and did homework, her classroom was more familiar to me and easier to work in than most other classrooms in my gigantic school.

Conversely, I don't think I walked out of a classroom quicker than I did after my very last Honors Precalculus class.

I went to that class every day for a year, and my teacher was STILL calling me by the wrong name. To this day, almost everyone who was in that class with me calls me Cassandra as a joke, despite the fact that we told her multiple times that it was wrong.

Although it wasn't my best subject, I never wanted to work on anything for that class. The teacher was a sweet lady, but I dreaded going to Precalculus every day of my junior year.

I didn't want to be better in that subject because she never gave me a good reason to want to.

Having a teacher that was involved in my life, like my French teacher was, made me want to add a second major to my undergrad.

I'm not going to be teaching French, but I want to be better at it. That's because I always enjoyed doing work for that class. I want to study abroad in France, and I know that if I ever need any help or just want to say hi, my previous teacher's just a short email away.

Teaching isn't just about shoving information into our brains for a test. It's about helping to shape minds of the world's future leaders. The teachers who realize that are the ones who deserve the biggest applause.

Thank you.