Middle School Teacher Appreciation Speech by Kara S. '20

Hi! My name is Kara S.. I am currently in 9th grade and not but 50 weeks ago, I was sitting where you are now. 
First off, to my old teachers: I am very sorry for all the havoc I probably caused in your class. I swear I didn’t mean to. You were all positively wonderful. That was just me being a pre-teen.

To those of you who managed to avoid me: nice to meet you. You’ve probably already heard enough about my incessant ramblings and crazy math gibberish talk, so I won’t bore you with the details.

Okay. I could go on for about three hours talking about how bizarre middle school me was, but instead I’m going to talk about how that crazy little soccer obsessed girl became more confident, competent, and ready for change. And how all of that, and I mean all of that, can be traced back to the teachers around you right now.

After I left middle school it would have been very easy to underestimate or downplay what I had learned, but jokes aside, the teachers here, in middle school, sitting in those bleachers? Yeah, they changed my life. And for so many different reasons and in so many different ways.

So let’s start at the beginning. When I entered middle school, I had this crazy notion in my head that I had peaked in fifth grade. First off, that is completely crazy, nobody peaks in fifth grade. But basically the idea of a comfortable, normal zone outside of my little elementary bubble that I spent seven years creating wasn’t even a possibility. And so I arrived to my first year of middle school with a sense of dread, which isn’t exactly the best way to head into anything, let alone school.

But, one of the first things I was taught by these teachers sitting around us wasn’t the quadratic equation, or that I absolutely must have oxford commas in my writing or else I will be marked down (and by quite a few points), but that I needed to be confident and self-assured in all that I do. Every single teacher I met at my time in middle school--whether for a whole year, a semester, or even just once or twice--had a message, a way of looking at the world that they encouraged their students to see, and to learn from. I had so many teachers focus not only on the material, or the subject that they were teaching, but on the why’s and the how’s and purposes. They explored not only what we were doing, but why we should be doing it at all, and how we can discover ourselves amidst all of this learning and all of these facts and equations being thrown at us. I had multiple teachers--most all of them actually, if not all of them--that engaged in conversations about humans and the idea of personal goals and purposes. I actually had a teacher who assigned a whole project about life and what makes it worth it that challenged all of us to think outside of a normal english curriculum.

And, of course, you can’t have a talk about teachers without mentioning the actual material, now can you? Every single class that I walked into on my first day of each year was scary. The idea of a change from the comfort that I had created was insane. And if you haven’t picked up on this yet, change terrifies me to no end. It was because of these middle school teachers that I haven’t totally failed high school. Actually, it is because of the teachers here that I am comfortable giving this speech. I used to be afraid of things because they were scary, or different, or new, and teachers taught me that that is poor excuse. They taught me to not let those doubting parts of myself get in the way of trying something new.

We are always going to have to do things that we don’t like. That’s part of life. You’re going to have to take finals that, in the interest of honesty, you might not be ready for, or you might not like the subject--and that’s okay! You’re going to have days when everything is going downhill. But if you stop to listen to these wonderful role models around you, you will realize that if you have that many people, caring about you, trusting you, and willing to work towards your goals with you, that you can do anything. Whether it be athletic success, academic success, personal growth, all of that stems from teachers. So thank you. Thank you teachers for dealing with all of us, and all of our crazy secondary school nonsense that you probably are sick of by now. Thank you for realizing that we aren’t all the same. That we don’t all learn the same way. Thank you for helping and for listening and for being open to learning yourselves.

Last week I watched Dead Poets Society for the first time and there is a teacher, John Keating, who is played by Robin Williams, who changes the course of a group of boys’ lives. I watched that movie and, after I was done crying for about two hours, thought of my teachers here, and how all of them were their very own version of Keating. In the movie he says, “I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself”, and if these teachers taught me nothing else, which of course they have, it is to not undervalue the power of an individual. And I think that there is no greater lesson. So thank you, teachers. You have done so much more than you can ever imagine to help so many more kids than you think. Thank you.
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