You don’t build a person with a single blueprint. Instead, you build them with a thousand small, unseen moments. A question that cracks open a new world. A line of red ink that teaches you to mean what you say. A quiet nod of encouragement from across a chaotic classroom.
This is a letter of thanks to the architects of those moments, my teachers at Lewis E. Rowe Elementary School, Helen C. Cannon Junior High School, and Valley High School.
You may not remember me; I was neither a prodigy nor a pyromaniac, so I likely flew under the radar. But you are written into the code of who I am. My family has been a product of this school district for four generations, but it was on your watch that the person I am today was assembled, piece by piece.
Thank you for the gift of seeing things twice. During a fourth-grade lesson on the desert at Rowe Elementary, Ms. Carter held up a dull, gray rock and told us to look closer. She taught us to see not a stone, but a story of time, pressure, and immense change. It was the first time I understood that the most ordinary objects contain extraordinary worlds. She handed me a magnifying glass that day, and I have never put it down. Every time I dig beneath a headline or question a simple assumption, I am using the tool she gave me. (The lesson about paste not being a food group has also served me well.)
Thank you for the brutal, beautiful gift of the delete key. To the English and history teachers at Valley High, I am grateful for that sea of red ink. My early essays looked less like academic papers and more like crime scenes, covered in the red ink of my slaughtered adverbs and misplaced commas. You knew that a lazy sentence was a symptom of lazy thinking. You taught me that a well-supported argument was a form of respect, for the topic, for the reader, and most importantly for myself. You weren’t just correcting my grammar; you were teaching me to respect my own ideas enough to make them clear, sharp, and defensible. That lesson was a gift; one I unwrap every day.
Thank you for policing the hallways of our fragile teenage egos. Middle school is the awkward adolescence of life itself, and the teachers at Cannon were our (sometimes unwilling, always underpaid) chaperones. You were tasked with educating a building full of hormonal science experiments gone wrong, a job that deserves hazard pay and a lifetime supply of aspirin. Yet you taught the most difficult subjects of all: how to be a decent human, how to recover from embarrassment, and how to survive a bad haircut. You saw us at our most combustible and somehow, with a patience I still don’t fully understand, you shepherded us through to the other side.
Most of all, thank you for the lessons we never knew we were being taught. We were blissfully unaware that our schools were part of one of the country’s fastest-growing school districts, a system constantly bursting at the seams. We didn’t know about the funding battles or the logistical miracles required just to keep the lights on, because we were too busy worrying about pop quizzes and who was sitting with whom at lunch. We just knew that when the bell rang, you were there. You closed the classroom door on the chaos and created a world of order, curiosity, and purpose.
That is the quiet valor of a public school teacher. You are the steady hand in a world of constant change. You likely don’t remember me out of the thousands of students who passed through your doors. But I remember you. You are in every question I ask, every sentence I craft, and every story I try to tell. You gave me the tools, and I will never stop working to build something worthy of your gift.
Thank you.