In the midst of our busy lives, we often forget to pause and express our gratitude to those who have impacted us in a positive way. Whether it be a parent, friend, or mentor, showing how grateful you are for these people is something that needs to be done once in a while. Teachers, who have guided and nurtured us along the process of our development, are among the many individuals that we forget to show our appreciation to. But our teachers do so much and deserve more than a forgotten thank you—not only do they give up countless hours of their time to prepare for class and grade papers, but they also play a huge role in leaving lasting impressions on students.

After several days of being greeted by a warm smile and sitting in room C111, Mrs. Hatheway’s passion and love for teaching has become very prominent—she is one of the teachers who isn’t teaching merely to attain a paycheck, but to genuinely make a difference in her students’ lives. Whenever she teaches a lesson, she attempts to make her lecture as engaging as possible by adding memes and other references to popular culture to ensure that students will actually understand the material and to prevent them from dozing off as they would during any other boring lecture. In addition to that, her lessons don’t solely contain information that is needed in the curriculum—she also teaches students extra tidbits that they may want to learn and shows them different ways to analyze real-life situations. For instance, after overhearing students’ conversations about grammar problems that they did not understand on the SAT one day, she immediately took out some class time to teach them the skill.  

But, perhaps the most distinctive trait of Ms. Hatheway is how caring and open-minded she is. She understands that students may be drowning in homework on some days of the week, so she does everything that she can to accommodate everyone’s needs. Sometimes it may be an extended deadline, and sometimes it may even be a movie day to give students a chance to alleviate the huge amounts of stress that they may have. While some teachers may emphasize the need to finish assignments to earn better grades, Mrs. Hatheway emphasizes the need to maintain and prioritize one’s health over grades. She truly cares about the state of her students’ emotional health and will always take several minutes just to see how everyone is doing. And most importantly, she stresses that our grades or test scores don’t define us and that the most important thing that we can gain from education is happiness.

Meeting a teacher who creates such a healthy environment in the classroom is not something that most students get to experience. So thank you, Ms. Hatheway, for not only teaching us the arts of English but for teaching us life lessons that we may not learn in the traditional education system and for helping us blossom into better versions of ourselves.

-Kali Tam, 11, Pow Wow, Staff Writer