Dear Mr. Cipolla,
I cannot express my gratitude enough for everything you taught me in a short nine month period. I signed up for your class senior year expecting to learn physics, but I left that summer as a much-improved version of myself. I had doubted you at times, especially when we were a month away from two huge AP tests in your class, and you never once opened a textbook or even mentioned a formula relevant to the class. Instead, you talked about the importance of learning how to think. You tried to develop our minds, not just cram formulas and variables into them. After being challenged a lot this year at college, I know that everything you had said to me was correct. No, I do not know everything, and I never will, but that is okay, because you taught me how to think.
Possibly the greatest thing you taught me, despite being unintentional, was how to say “I don’t know”. You were the smartest person at the school, and although you would never admit it, I doubt anyone would disagree with me. You seemed to know everything about anything, and we loved being able to pick your brain. At times, when someone would ask a question and you were not sure of the answer, you would tell them that it is a great question, but you just don’t know. I found that to be extremely rare for someone, especially as smart as you, to be able to look another person in the eyes, and admit that they do not know, instead of guessing or making excuses, and it made me respect you that much more. I am by no means trying to claim to always be the smartest person in the room, but you showed me that accepting I do not know everything is so much more important than acting like I do.
Once again,
Thank you,
Chris Metzler
English 110 Honors Spring 2020 
Chris, I truly resonated with your letter because my letter was also to one of my high school teachers who didn’t just teach me English, but she also taught me how to think and approach life. I always reflect on the impact that teachers have on students. At the end of the day, they are the people students, up until their senior year of high school, spend some of the most time with. I also wonder what kind of people we would all be if teachers only taught material relevant to school, instead of enriching us with knowledge that is arguably far more important than something like physics or how to write an essay. Your physics teacher sounds like someone you will never forget, and the valuable lesson he taught you of being okay with not knowing seems like it will follow you throughout all of your experiences in life. I’m glad that you were lucky enough to have a teacher like you did, and I hope that all students, at some point in their life, have a similar experience.
– Selma Cemerlic
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“I appreciated how you wrote this to your physics teacher. Going through high school, I found that the best teachers were those who taught a subject by making the students understand the concepts as opposed to just memorizing from a textbook. I think that the most important lesson we all learn is being able to admit that you don’t know something and it’s wonderful that your teacher taught you this. The more we learn and seek answers to fill our lack of understanding, the more we expand our knowledge for the better. 🙂 ” -Ciana Gadut
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