The American Dream starts like this: your mother with her suitcase and her passport and her fear, the way she lands in New York for graduate school, or a job, or the rest of her life. It spreads across continents like gossip, or perhaps a disease. Any mother can tell you this, as she peels garlic or turns off the television.

For all its reincarnations, the American Dream ends in English. It ends simply, skitters around the barrier between languages, and watches paralyzed as your mother stumbles over her words on the phone. It dies a thousand times: in her emails, at the grocery store checkout line. When the neighbors cross the street as she approaches. The pronouns are always all too stiff, the verbs never conjugated correctly. The English like a knife in her throat.

The landscape of English education in our modern imagination typically takes on this form: dystopian, immobile. English is, for the most part, unlearnable. It loves early and infrequently, and manifests its affection into an implicit understanding of argumentation or rhetorical finesse. More importantly, it loves the chaos it creates, the competition it fosters among the unequal. How adjectives and intonations become weaponized, and how English becomes a barrier to communication more than a language.

Ms. Landis’s classroom antithesizes this reality. There are conventions that Thank You letters typically follow—the strong sense of setting, subject-based imagery, and inside humor. If I mentioned all of these, perhaps I would paint a vivid picture of the classroom speckled with Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes and seemingly inane plushies. I want, however, to write a letter to the teacher who cares so much about her students that she whittles down the English education for every daughter.

It seems bygone to conclude that a class with the end goal of a 5 subverts quantitative standards. When education, however, returns to the innocence of learning, the comparison of numbers becomes arbitrary unless it is between past and present self.

Ms. Landis’s teaching dissolves the conventions of English. The progression of the English education introduces new building blocks every year. Subject and predicate, then clause and conjunction. The first month of AP Language is dedicated to the memorization of these blocks: anaphora, ellipsis, hyperbole.

But blocks are only a roundabout means to end—for many, English remains unconquerable. Ms. Landis, however, teaches past these tools. In her classroom, English rediscovers its own power, rebranding itself as a language past the rhetorical devices and repetitive conventions.

This transformation is quiet, but profound. It takes root in her patient lectures, and spreads silent tendrils into close-readings of passages and speech transcripts. It marvels at the elegance of student samples, or perhaps the ingenuity. It begins to respect the study of tradition for the innovation it unveils, and the beauty in the manipulation of language. English changes this attitude. In turn, it changes English.

Language creates images, and Ms. Landis sustains them—her classroom’s flamingo memorabilia, for example, embodies the absurdity of flamingo culture that students will eventually examine.

Here, Ms. Landis begins to dissolve the English language past devices and puzzle pieces. Passages become cradles of rhetoric, instead of rhetorical devices. And the study of English takes on a new shape, one in which language inspires emotion.

The English education typically works forward from the identification of strategies: this device makes the reader feel a certain way. Ms. Landis, however, teaches her students this process in reverse. They first isolate specifically powerful lines in passages. Then, they search for explanations and decipher the power of argumentation and language.

This is how the appreciation of language typically plays out. One does not read a book underlining metaphors and looking for rhetorical devices. Rather, the love of language reveals its heartbeat after the fact: readers understand plot devices and characters upon reflection.

Ms. Landis fosters this appreciation for language through her own compassion and personability. Her excitement at clever phrasing inspires. Discussions are welcoming, and she thoughtfully considers answers that are conventionally “wrong”.

And finally, our weaponization of English is dissolved. When the study of English becomes the study of power through language, essays and responses are no longer a means of stratification. Rather, student-led norming is an open forum for discourse, and studied passages represent strong ideas backed by novel language.

Ms. Landis, I always viewed English as a tool for belonging. Thank you for transforming it once again to a language.