I want to start by saying this: teachers, thank you for all that you do. While I don’t regularly multiply fractions or write papers on Shakespeare every day, the skills I’ve gained from your guidance are irreplaceable.

As a society, we are masterminds when it comes to taking credit for things we did not do alone. No one is born knowing how to read, how to add and subtract or how to recite the alphabet but these are all still skills we take for granted.

When you tell people you want to be a teacher, they give you this look that screams “sweetie, are you sure about that?” followed by speech emphasizing all the reasons you should reconsider. At first, it’s easy to brush it off because in your heart you know that teaching is something that you were meant to do, but then you start questioning everything and chicken out.

Why do people want to work in an unsafe, sometimes disrespectable environment for peanuts? Is it because they want to see the world become a better place or because they know that at the end of the day they are contributing to the greater good?

Teachers, school librarians and school counselors are the backbones of our society but they are treated like their time and knowledge do not matter. See the unfair treatment of teachers in Hillsborough County who were denied the pay raises they were promised or the fact that a teacher’s pay can be linked to how well students perform on standardized tests.

We should be giving the reigns of the classroom back to teachers instead of trying to arm them or letting them being controlled by standardized regulations. We should let them teach and allow them to fall back in love with their passion for educating others.

I would not be the person I am today without the guidance of my teachers. These are the people that opened by eyes to things I would never have considered on my own and I wish I had the guts to follow in their footsteps.

We cannot stand tall and call ourselves the greatest nation in the world without the knowledge we’ve gained from teachers. Without them, who are we?