To my High School English Teacher(s),

Thank you for everything you have done for me. As I go through my senior year of college (gasp), enough time has passed since high school that I can see how truly essential you were in leading me towards my passion. I'm majoring in English, and I'm not doing it because it I thought it would be easy, or because I thought there wouldn't be a whole lot of tests. I'm doing it because you taught me how to love written word.

Thank you for assigning us "The Great Gatsby" and "Heart of Darkness." Thank you even more for making us take quizzes every class to make sure we had done the reading. Thank you for forcing me to get off my laptop after school and pick up a good book, and also for making sure I understood everything that good book had to offer. Even though I often complained about being assigned too much reading or that a book was "boring," I've learned that those boring books with the confusing imagery and crazy allegories were fundamental parts of my education. Because of your insistence, I can now proudly reference "Catcher in the Rye," "Hamlet," and hundreds of other texts whenever I want to, and believe me, it's much more impressive than referencing the Kardashians.

Thank you for all the angry red pen marks you left on my papers. Thank you for correcting all the stupid, lazy grammar mistakes I've made, and for driving into my head the difference between "your" and "you're." Without you, my papers were riddled with run-on sentences and way too many commas. Thank you for painstakingly drilling the grammar rules into my head, and thank you for not getting totally frustrated when I continued to forget them.

Finally, thank you for teaching me to love to write. Thank you for making sure I wrote what I cared about, and not just what was assigned to me. You made creative writing fun, and analytical essays challenging but rewarding (analytical essays, by nature, can never be fun). You taught me how to have a voice - not only in my papers, but in class as well. You taught me how to love literature in a way that I was comfortable arguing about it or even disagreeing with others on their opinions. Because of this, I'd also like to thank you for not laughing at all of our hair-brained analyses of the stories we read.

Essentially, I am writing this to you, my high school English teacher, because you taught me how to. You taught me how to express myself through reading and writing. Because of that, I can now sincerely tell you, thank you very much for all that you do.