Dear A. Gariner,

You had medium length brown hair and a sickeningly sweet smile. You were enthusiastic. Straight out of college. Hopeful. It was the 2010 to 2011 school year at Horizon High School. You were supposed to teach world history: nicknamed WAFL. You approached our class as a future, flourishing friendship.

You tried so hard to teach us. Initially, you used PowerPoint's like your lessons were a college presentation. We listened patiently at first. You gained some confidence. You learned a few names, but to this day I'm not sure you knew my name.

You separated our classroom of almost 50 in half and mistakenly used the word gangrene in your explanation. We never let it go. We thought, adamantly, that you believed our half of the class a disease. We took all future words you said out of context. We refused to listen to you after that.

Our seasoned teachers, your mentors, let you drown.

I heard that we made you cry.

I don't remember any of the lessons you taught. I don't remember the methods or strategies you implemented. But I do remember the day you tried to make us silently take notes from the text book. You wrote down our actions that day and shared them with us the next day. You sat on the table in front of our difficult little half of the class and your voice was angry, frustrated. You read to us what the other "good" half of the class had done during the assigned note taking time. They read their text books. They took notes. You launched into a list of what we had done during that class period:

Read the text book upside down
Read a different class book
Did math homework
Made faces at our neighbors
Stared at the wall
Stared at the floor
Stared at our neighbors
Stared at you

By the end I remember that you couldn't keep the scowl off your face. Soon the whole class had burst into giggles.

I remember the end of the year party competition you let us do. I remember us painting you as our own resident Marie Antoinette.

I only say these things because in exactly one year I will be a student teacher, standing in front of a class full of teenagers and trying my hardest not to say the wrong thing, teach the wrong thing, or mess it all up royally.

I only say these things because I've had to evaluate how hard it is to teach a group of teenagers who think they're smarter and more experienced than anyone else in any given room at any given time. I've had to think about how to approach teenagers not much younger than myself and get them to respect me as an authority figure. I've had to say the wrong things a few times, be at a loss of what to do next, and embarrass myself royally to understand how hard it is to be a teacher.

I only say these things because I want to tell you I'm sorry. I want you to know that I admired your courage to come back day after day and try something new, all the way to the end of the year. I want you to know that it wasn't just you. We were a particular group of assholes that had been in classes together for three years. I want you to know that it wasn't your fault that we couldn't respect authority at the ages of 15, 16, and even 17.

I want you to know that you are one of the reasons that I entered the teaching program at my university. I want you to know that you had an impact, even when you were at a loss for words.

Sincerely,
Kelsey S.

I can't read.

This is a phrase I hear frequently in the classrooms I've observed. It is usually mumbled and their ears start to turn bright red, the blush working their way across their face as their classmates stare.

My first experience in a classroom was an 8th grade Read 180 classroom. For those of you that aren't aware of what Read 180 is, it is a program designed to help kids get closer to their grade level of reading through small groups and a computer program. The class can consist of general education students or special education students, though usually it is the latter.

In this class of about 12 there was a student, let's call him Andy, that didn't like me very much. He was a social kid with lots of friends and had plenty of girls to flirt with. When ever he would get on the computer to do the module for the day he would constantly distract his partner. I would inevitably kneel down between the two and look at Andy.

"Can you work on the assignment for the day? You haven't even read the passage."

His ears turned red and it rushed across the back of his neck. "I can't read."

Now if he truly couldn't read he would have been placed in a lower level Intervention class, so I knew that that statement wasn't quite true.

I had no idea what to tell him. I was never sure what to tell him actually, and I'm still formulating a proper response.

Further through the semester he and I got into our share of battles. He, at one point, shouted at me in front of the whole class while the teacher was out of the classroom.

He had yelled, "You're not my teacher!"

We had to have a talk, me, Andy, and the Read 180 teacher. He mumbled an apology. The teacher looked him straight in the face and said, "Don't treat her like you treated me the first few weeks."

I had two more weeks left in the classroom and Andy and I had been getting along surprisingly well. He had finally warmed towards me a little bit. He did what I asked during our small groups most of the time, grudgingly I might add.

On my last day we were joking around with a few of the other boys going over literary elements for their poems. I told them that knowing these things are important.

Andy said something that I'll never forget. "Why? It's not like we are going to finish high school anyways."

We, as teachers, all are taught that education is the pinnacle of society and at the age of 14, they already decided that their future had nothing to do with school. Some of the boys agreed with Andy's statement, others didn't.

I wish I'd had the courage to stow the smile and tell them, "Reading is a learned skill. It is not something that is supposed to occur naturally in your brain. Reading is like any other learned skill, you have to practice. If you chose to goof off and not try and say you hate reading, you will continue to hate it and think yourself more stupid for not knowing.

"You are not stupid. You're just a rookie. If you never practice, you'll never be varsity."

Not saying anything is one of my biggest regrets. My not speaking up probably confirmed exactly what he thought about himself, and that's something that I can never fix.