Thank You.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you to all of our hard working teachers who spend their days in their classrooms, doing their best to reach and teach our children. Thank you for the work that you do, and especially thank you to all of those who took the time to thank me for my post. You are the real heroes, and we all owe you a debt of gratitude.

Thank you to everyone who read my post.

Thank you to everyone who learned something from my post.

Thank you everyone who was moved by my post.

Thank you to everyone who shared my post.

Thank you to everyone whose perspective changed, even a tiny bit, as a result of my post.

Thank you to teachersletterstobillgates.com for sharing my post.

Thank you to Valerie Strauss for reading my words, tracking me down, and asking permission to share my thoughts on her blog The Answer Sheet at The Washington Post. I appreciate the opportunity to share the platform Ms. Strauss established more than I can say. In particular, thank you, Ms. Strauss, for your kind words and encouragement — in recent years, I’ve spent far more time writing legal briefs than personal essays, and the encouragement to continue finding my creative voice helps. It really does.

Thank you to all of you who commented on my post, whether publicly or privately. It is the conversations we have that are the first steps to making sure that our schools — and our teachers — reflect our values. I think that teaching, learning, and education happen most authentically and meaningfully in the context of a conversation. So to all of you who have been willing to have that conversation, I very much appreciate your time and your thoughts. In particular, I appreciate the perspectives from those who don’t agree with me — or, in some cases, from those who assume that we don’t agree. I’ve learned something from each of you. By the way, someone in the comments accused me of having deleted his or her comment: I assure you that if a comment disappeared, it wasn’t intentional (and I don’t think I deleted anything), but if it did happen, it was merely a result of my inexperience with the WordPress and BlogPad Pro platforms, and was most certainly not an intentional effort to silence criticism: that is the last thing I would ever want to do.

I will write more. I have more stories to tell, and more to say. But first I need to attend to my family and my job.

Thank you, so much, for listening and responding. I am honored and humbled by the attention and experience of having my words go “viral.” It is good to know that I am not alone.

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