To My High School Literature Teachers

I just wanted to take the time to say thank you. As I am now passed high school, and have time to look back on my life I find great joy when thinking about my literature teachers. But of course, their influence wasn’t just to the classroom or my grades. In middle school, and going into my freshman year, I was still figuring out who I was as a person. In fact, back then I didn’t like lit classes. I had lost my interest in reading and never thought I would enjoy writing. My mind told me I wanted to do something that would be “productive”, when all I did was watch movies, play video games, and draw, all forms of storytelling.

A move and my parents’ divorce, which brought a lot of emotional turmoil and revelation, caused me to become stoic as I forced myself to grow up. I had hardened both my body and my mind so I could be a parent to myself when mine could not, and I could be my mother’s peg leg when she needed me to be, although she probably didn’t think of me as such at the time. I wanted direction and stability for myself and honestly, I wanted to be out of my parents’ conflict altogether. In my eyes the military was the way to achieve that, so I decided to join Decatur High School’s JROTC program. To cut my amazing journey short, JROTC taught me how to focus myself to work in the real world; it built my morals, confidence, and leadership that I was determined to find. In the switch from sophomore to junior year of high school I started to realize this hard-ass militant personality I had become was not truly me, and that my personality, my true personality, laid somewhere beneath that crust. I had inklings brought up from my artistic development in graphic design, drama classes, and constant drawing, but literature brought me back to who I was, a storyteller, a creator, and through all those art classes I was able to practice it.

 It was my junior year literature teacher, Mr. E, who I actually had in eight grade as well, who helped me to truly realize this.  It was his enthusiasm and the unique way of thought that he brought to the classroom that encouraged me to get involved in my own thoughts. I realized that the reason I used to despise literature classes was the way it was performed. We only ever focused on technicalities or would only ever brush the surface of the true meaning of literature. In Mr. E’s class we started to read poetry, short stories, and novels, but instead of writing a book report and moving on with our lives, we held discussions in class where we were forced to look at everything in new ways and to determine meaning from it all. Junior literature class captured my old interest in reading, reading for fun, and rethinking my understanding of literature as means of communication. There were still projects and papers that felt meaningless and boring, only had because of the rules of the learning system.

 It wasn’t until senior year when that all seemed to fade away and our class was so much for focused on discussion into the deeper meaning. So many of my peers would constantly complain about IB HL Lit/Lang year two and I thought, how could anyone dislike literature? All we do is read and talk about amazing books by acclaimed authors such as, Kurt Vonnegut, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Haruki Murakomi. To my surprise not all the other classes followed our suit. In fact, my class was the only one that worked on our level of education. Everyone else was following regulations, boring the students. I believe my classmates and I have come out with a better literary education than the rest of the class of 2016, because discussion leads to deeper thought and interpretation. Which is what most high school classes lack. It was totally to Ms Williams, my senior year high school literature teacher, that my interest and truly my development as a person, was allowed to grow, and to realize my love for literature and connection to the arts again. Of course, in those two years there were boring points where I doodled on the side of my notes, and of course not all credit for the rekindling of me can be given to my literature teachers, as my development also occurred in art and drama classes, as well as outside the class room.

But this is about literature, and how my high school classes drew me to love it, and connected it to the rest of my art, and my understanding of all art. High school developed my knowledge of why we need literature, and more importantly, to what extent it may be used. I was challenged and often felt as though what I was doing was wrong, or that I just wasn’t getting it, so I always looked for new perspectives, new ideas, and my essays and additions to our discussions started digging deeper, allowing me to gain a larger understanding of human nature and the world. I gained and understanding that is necessary for all people who are alive and live in our world.

In high school, JROTC taught me how to be strong and decisive. My long list of extracurricular focused around the arts guided and connected by literature, taught me how to love, find beauty, and think about the world as I would not have before. To have both sides. I have found an odd medium between both worlds, an understanding of both, which is the epitome of a liberal education, a truly free education. I have found that a lot of people do not think about high school education after they graduate. Many look back to nostalgic times with their friends, but so rarely do we focus on how much our academics meant. To some it may have not played an enormously important role, but our families, friends, teachers, and the classes we took shaped who we are. For others it may have been math, science, history, sports, art, or any other plethora of classes, but for me it was all do to the creativity of my teachers of junior and senior year. It was because of the strength of their characteristics that helped me develop my own, to once again dig up who I am, and that helped me learn how to continue to learn for the rest of my life.