Letters To My Teachers

To those who helped shape me, thank you.

This is intended to be a brief series of letters written to the teachers of my past who helped me to become who I am. My preamble to this is that those of us who are neurodivergent and see the world in different ways are often responsible for innovation and transformation in our societies AND can be challenged and pushed aside by our education systems. 

For most of my life, I didn't understand that the ways in which I was different were also my gifts. There were many teachers who inadvertently taught me that the ways I thought, acted, and performed, specifically in school, were a hindrance to me and maybe even represented an unfortunate fate. I’ve also written letters to those teachers who helped me to identify my uniqueness as a gift.

These letters attempt to illustrate the ways in which our traditional education system does not serve those who have brains suited for entrepreneurship, connection, transformation, and innovation, and to acknowledge how important and special those who do understand are to us, and to our society.

Dear Mrs. Senta:

I'm forever grateful for the way in which you taught me my times tables, I know I struggled endlessly in the normal class, memorization could never work. This idea of repeating back, out loud, in front of the class, things that made no sense to me and had no grounding in the real concrete or magical and artistic world that I lived in petrified me and caused me to feel shame. However, our time together in ‘Special Ed’ came with a connotation, stigma, and a heaviness that followed me for a lot of years. Even worse, the way that you talked to me, like you were doing me a favor, like I was lesser then. Your lack of belief in me rubbed off on me. 

I remember the day of my high school graduation I was walking through the parking lot to grab one of the cords, for those of you who aren't up on the high school graduation thing, cords are a symbol of achievement, and I had many of them in high school. I don't know if you remember this Mrs. Senta, but you came up to me in the parking lot and you looked at me and you bent over and you got a big smile on your face and you said, “Ohhhh you’re graduating!” as if matriculating from high school was already a bigger accomplishment than you could have ever imagined I could make. This broke my heart and ignited a fire in it. 

Thank you.

Dear Mrs. Jones:

It was unlikely that I would have ever made it to calculus to begin with, I'll give you that. It was even more unlikely that I pass calculus, I'll also give you that. But, when I shared with you my deepest strivings to become a doctor and serve people in their healing, you said, “You know that you need to be able to do calculus to do that, right?” you said it in the snarkiest most shameful way, looking through me as if you could see my innermost doubts in myself.  You brought them to the surface and, somehow, made them bigger than I could have on my own. On that day I decided I would not become a doctor, because I knew in a part of myself that you were right, I could never do calculus.

What you failed to see is that the way that I graduated from high school and the way that I passed your class was not about my ability to complete mathematical equations. It was my ability to use my creative thinking, my industriousness, to lean on my relationships, and even my ability to intuit what people most desire in the world. In high school my enrollment of others in my success looked like copying homework, thinking on the fly to talk my way out of things, and making the best goddamn best artichoke dip in the world ( and that got me a “B” in your class). 

It might have not been my math skills, but I had other skills that more than made up for it. So for your lack of confidence in me, and for trying to confine my abilities into a small box that I soon learned to break in order to become fully myself, thank you.

Dear Mrs. Crawline, excuse me, Dear Dr. Crawline:

I so admired you, you had these cute clothes and a fun way of talking about psychology and such confidence, it allows me to imaging that I too could become a doctor, I could be like Dr. Crawline. I remember the day I worked up the courage to walk into your office and to admit that I too wanted to go to graduate school, that I wanted to study human behavior, and that I wanted to learn how to sway the hearts and minds of people and bend them towards wholeness and healing. I remember that day, when I walked into your office and you told me “Graduate school is hard, you’ll have to get good grades, and complete your homework on time, graduate students are very diligent students.” while looking at me with just a tiny bit of sadness and with an apology in your voice like you were trying to say without saying, “You can't do this.” 

What you didn't know about me is that when I want something, I can do anything. After that day that I walked out of your office with two years left of college for me to prove you the fuck wrong I studied, I failed, I read, I talked, I learned like I have never learned before in my entire life. In the first two years of college I barely scraped by with a 2.9 in the last two, I achieved a 4.0, bringing my average just high enough to get into the grad schools that I desired. 

So for your moment of sadness where you believed that my ship had sailed and that I wasn't the type of person that could ever achieve what you did, thank you. Because it taught me that I do know how to learn and that I do know how to grow and that I can care about even the most mundane asinine shit that has nothing to do with where I’m headed, if the outcome is important enough. So, thank you.

Dear Mr. Johnson:

Even as I say your name I'm crying because when I was only 15 years old you saw in me what took another 10 years for any other person (including myself) to see. I remember two things specifically about my time that I spent in your class.

You reflected that you thought I had the type of brain that ‘needs to know everything before I’d be able to understand anything’ and I'm not sure that I totally got it when you said it. All of these years later, I’m starting to understand that I was born to be a doctor and I can’t help but to be a leader. Anything with less altitude or ambition than these titles was too small for me to even begin comprehending. Reading history, completing math problems, and standardized tests were torture for me. My brain immediately turned to soup and I might have looked like I couldn't learn and I couldn't hack it. What was really happening was that I just hadn't yet gone far enough. With another 10 years of perseverance and hard work (and people who believed in me)  I would emerge from all of that struggle and all of that soupy darkness into a fully formed and integrated brain that has a quick ability to understand and innovate, thank you.

Dear Mr Anders:

Wow! I really struggled in Middle School. I was depressed. I was lonely. I hated myself. One way I tried to work out my teenage angst was getting myself put in detention. But somehow you saw me. I wasn't like some of the other kids in detention, I wasn't sitting in the corner smoking cigarettes, fucking off, I was paying attention, I was looking for someway to be, some way to feel meaningful and to discover my worth. Your expert eye somehow knew that if you could enroll me in service and something bigger than myself, you might help me unlock enthusiasm, persuasiveness, connectedness, and creativity. It seems that you already had confidence that I could transform the stale and self-deprecating, shameful energy into something productive and beautiful. 

I went from depression in detention, to a team member with my friend Lena (also with a knack for getting in trouble…and getting out of it)  who ran a record smashing toilet paper drive (only to be surpassed by my sister in the following year). 

You saw me and you knew me before I knew myself. You gave me space to be different. You helped me learn that being how I was wasn't a death sentence but in fact a super power, thank you.