An Open Letter to Past Students
Dear Past Students,
I. Miss. You.
I don’t miss how exhausted I was when I was teaching you all at once, but still…I’m thinking about you with startling regularity. I still have your coloring sheets on display, your friendship bracelet on my wrist, your notes tucked away in books, your classroom antics bursting with laughter into my memory. Now you are learning different things in different classrooms with different teachers…hopefully teachers who require less coffee than I did.
But do you remember the day we were in class on the 22nd of some month in the year 2022 and I paused class, turned on Taylor Swift’s “I’m Feeling Twenty-Two,” and made you dance to it? Do you remember the time it started raining during class and we went out to play in the brief desert storm? Do you remember the time I pretended to be my husband and used a piece of Magic Eraser as a mustache? Do you remember when the nursery shared an adjoining door with our classroom and we made the nursery teacher laugh till she cried by pretending to be operatic cowboys singing our memory work?
Do you remember how much joy you brought me? You did. Just because you gave me the opportunity to make learning fun.
I hope you remember the sentence diagramming and map drawing and memory verses too (especially the memory verses), but if you can’t, the things you really can’t compromise on remembering are as follow:
You are well-loved. Each and every one of you.
You can do hard things, and you can even make them fun. Most of the time. Sometimes, the hard things are just hard, and we get through them as gracefully as we can by using grit and determination, and that’s a different kind of reward.
Nothing is wasted. Even the time you spent listening to me wax eloquent about the Oxford comma. Sometimes the things you think you can’t remember or didn’t fully understand at the time will come to mind right when you need them most. (You will always need the Oxford comma.)
Getting an education—it’s not something that just happens to you. You have to actively engage if you want it to matter.
You will have a lot of different teachers in your life, and they will teach you in many different ways. You won’t always like all of them—and contrary to popular belief, you didn’t always like me either. Take advantage of every opportunity to learn. Push yourself. Don’t settle for just showing up. Your education is what you make of it.
At the end of the day, ask yourself: what do I really want out of life? What does God really want for me? Because you may be surprised how the answers to those questions have the ability to shape the choices that you make.
My home is always open to you. My hugs are always yours. And one more time, for the ones in the back having trouble hearing me because they’re drawing battle scenes littered with arrow-punctured bodies: I love you… and I miss you.
Yours (for real),
Ms Friz
PS Obviously, I’m talking to you.
