I thank my teachers for all the time and attention they have given me.

Think of a sentence someone once wrote in the margin of your work. Odds are you can still quote it, and odds are they do not remember writing it.

That is the peculiar economy of teaching. The effort spreads thin across thirty people and lands unevenly, and the parts that land hardest are almost never the parts that were planned.

Teachers rarely find out. They release people into the world and get no report back. If one of yours is still reachable, a two-line message naming the sentence that stuck would be, for them, information they have spent a career not receiving.