Letters from fake students

Dear Ms. Jiang,

My name is Jane, Zhu. Maybe you don’t remember me, but I always remembered you. I am writing to you because at my 10 year graduation anniversary, you are one of few teachers I would like to thank. I am now a new Math teacher in China. I remember how terrible my math was when I entered high school. It was my least favourite subject. I was lucky to have you as my math teacher, because you were not only nice to us, but also made math fun. I remember the numerous brain tearing but interesting puzzles we did during our classes, and I remember the historical stories about math you told us in our math club after school. But most importantly, I remember you told me that, “Math is scary only if you don’t get it” and you were the one that helped me “getting” it. For all the troubles I made and all the questions I repeatedly asked, I would like to thank you for being a nice, patient and professional teacher who led me into my current well-loved career.

Please visit me when you come back.

Best,

Jane

Dear Ms. Jiang,

My name is John, Ahu. Maybe you don’t remember me, but I always remembered you. I am writing to you because at my 10 year graduation anniversary, you are one of few teachers I would like to send a letter and let you know something that I always wanted to say. I am now a successful business man, but numbers were not and will not be my favourite topic to talk about. And I want to let you know that it’s all because of you. You made me feel stupid and ashamed by asking me so many questions in front of the whole class and what made it worse was that you knew that I was never good at math. Your effort of forcing me into math only made me hate it more. I want to let you know that I was a failed math student through out my high school all because of your over-practiced teaching methods.

Best,

But I don’t want to hear from you.

John



By writing these letters, I really feel the power of a teacher (even though they are fake). Often, your unconscious gestures or even just one word will affect your students for an incredible long time in their lives, and the consequences are, sometimes good, but sometimes unfortunately very bad. I am glad that we did this activity because even though I acknowledge that a teacher takes a lot of responsibilities, but the feeling is a lot stronger when I actually put the words down.
Hong