For the Love of a Student: Dear Ms. N

Dear Ms. N,

In the third grade, I hated to read. My reading level was well below grade level. My writing was subpar. A teacher before you told me my spelling was atrocious. A word I had no idea what it meant.

You read to us. A series called the Magic Tree House by Mary Pope Osborn. Those books set me free. They gave me this incredible world with incredible adventures that I could lose myself in.

I wanted more. I wanted to be reading every waking moment of every day. I wanted to escape the world that I had been born into. A world of terror and trauma. But I thought I was stupid. I thought I couldn’t read. I had struggled with school so much and felt like I was so behind, even as an 8 year old.

But you believed in me. You encouraged me to read these books I loved. You wrote me extra passes to the library as I finished these books, one right after another. You even bought some of them for me to fill in the holes where books were missing from the library.

Thanks to your encouragement, my reading level skyrocketed. By the end of the year, I had finished not only all the Magic Tree House books, but I had read Harry Potter and was working my way through the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Your faith in me was the first step in a domino effect that ended with me graduating at the top of my class and getting into a good college. All because you believed in me.

Thank you. Thank you for believing in me, even when I did not believe in myself.

Love,

Arianna