Letter to My Old Students

Dear former students,

I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.

If I could go back to my very first year teaching seventh-grade English — young, enthusiastic, and figuring it out as I went — I would do many things differently. Not because I didn’t care. I cared so deeply. But because I now know so much more about what it really means to be an educator.

You taught me. Through your questions, your breakthroughs, your laughter, and even your frustrations, you shaped me into a better teacher.

I remember playing Enya at the beginning of class. You loved it, and years later when I taught some of you again in high school, you still mentioned how much that calm start meant to you. I remember our first-year A Christmas Carol unit in the dead of winter — I sent letters home telling everyone to wear jackets, turned the room freezing cold, served hot chocolate, and we acted out the scene where Scrooge watches Bob Cratchit with Tiny Tim. You still talked about that years later.

I remember after the tsunami in Thailand, we wrote letters and put together care packages for soldiers. I remember covering the walls in black butcher paper and letting you do graffiti for A House on Mango Street. I remember in AP Literature building a real quilt with my teaching partner (she was the one who actually knew how to sew it), and making you keep nature journals even though many of you complained at first. So many of you later told me how much it meant to learn to slow down and really see the world around you.

I also remember the joy of having so many of you from middle school all the way through high school graduation. In a big district, that was rare, and it was such a gift to watch you grow from awkward seventh graders into young adults ready to launch into the world.

There were also moments I wish I could redo. Times when the pressure of testing and coverage made me push too hard for “correct” answers instead of giving you more space to think. Times I may have made you doubt yourself when I was really just trying to help you grow. For those moments, I’m sorry. I was doing the best I could with what I knew then, but I wish I could go back and do better — with more patience, more trust, and more room for your own voices and ideas.

Thank you. Thank you for your patience with a young teacher who was still learning. Thank you for the jokes (like hiding the cell phone on the projector so it would ring and I couldn’t find it — I still laugh thinking about how you trusted me enough to play those pranks). Thank you for letting me be part of your stories.

Wherever you are now, I hope you know you were never just names in my gradebook. You mattered then, and you still matter to me.

With so much gratitude and affection,

Kim