This article was originally published in the author’s blogs on Substack and WordPress on 3 October 2026. The full text is reproduced below with the author’s permission.
Hey there!
Yes, it’s me again, with yet another letter. Looking back, I realize I’ve written my students so many letters, at least two for each batch I taught. I always tried to keep my rambling to a minimum, but I won’t hold back today.
It’s strange that this letter has been so easy and so difficult to write. I seem to never run out of things I want to tell you, but also I can never find the right words to do so.
Maybe it’s because I can’t quite figure out what I’m trying to say. I think it’s a goodbye (with many tangents and asides) — a final one to you, and a momentary one to teaching. I think it’s also a reminder, a record of a time in my life that I will treasure for a long time.
As a farewell, this letter has been writing itself at the back of my mind for quite some time, earlier and more frequently than you may have expected. It’s odd, isn’t it, to describe a farewell as “frequent”? Those things usually only happen once, but not in my case I guess. In one sense, it was always almost happening, a potential departure that was hanging over me for a long time. At the same time, it was happening often, repeatedly, at the end of every semester. It was always a relief and a surprise to find out that I would have one more sem of teaching a subject that, as I’m sure you have been able to tell, I care about so much. But that’s the thing. A person can take only so many farewells, and this person reached her limit.
But I digress.
It’s probably been a while since you’ve thought of me or about my class. I suppose our relationship has always been a bit disproportionate like that. Perhaps it is the blessing and curse of a teacher to think about your students more than your students think about you. Or is that just me?
I loved this subject so much that it was always on my thoughts, which meant I ended up thinking about you a lot. While I was teaching, my teacher mode was always on. What I mean is that I’d be doing lecture prep by just living my life. Whether I was reading for fun, talking to friends, or watching movies, I would often think to myself, “Hey, I should tell my students about this in class tomorrow!” In a way, to be a teacher is to see one’s students everywhere.
Now that I’m not teaching anymore though, I just keep adding to a very long list of things I should have said and done. The teacher mode is still on, but that just leaves me with many thoughts and insights and no one to share them with. Maybe that’s why I’m writing you a letter (again).
Many of you are walking into a classroom today, but I’m not. Not anymore.
During the first few weeks of class, there was always a weird feeling in my chest as I passed a row of classrooms and heard other teachers discuss their syllabi and class policies and knew I wouldn’t be doing the same. I felt it when I realized that my name wasn’t in the subject offerings for enlistment this sem and when I hesitated to delete the Canvas Teacher app off my phone. It hit me most strongly when I found out about a Rizal-themed breakout room for Buwan ng Wika and History Month. It was about the manuscript of Makamisa, and I think you guys would have had fun if we went. It would have been a really good bonus activity, but there is no longer a class that I teach for that to matter.
Why does it sting to speak about teaching in the past tense? It also doesn’t help that my office is at the end of a hallway full of classrooms.
Every time I walk by, I hear the strain in teachers’ voices as they try to make themselves heard above the rain and the electric fans. I hear the rustle of students shaking out umbrellas and turning notebook pages. I hear (and feel!) the teacher’s relief when a joke lands, and the students’ relief that hey, maybe this subject won’t be so bad after all. Somehow, as much as these things are removed from me, they are still so dear to me, all the more now that they are things of the past.
So melodramatic! You might tell me, “Miss, it’s not that deep.” But to me, it was. It is.
It is said that you only realize how precious something is when you are about to lose it. I guess that’s why teaching was always so precious to me — because I always thought that I was about to lose it. This letter is a goodbye that I have said many, many times.
It feels so silly to mourn something for so long and so deeply even if sometimes I feel like I was teaching only in a shallow, watered down way. I was a part-time lecturer with a part-time subject load, I had only one prep for the year and a half I taught in university, making the time I spent in a traditional classroom a measly total of two and a half calendar years. But this letter isn’t about proving to myself that I have a right to this heartache. This letter is for telling you all the things I wanted to say but never did, and I’ll start with this:
I cared about you a lot.
I probably came off as distant because I intended to. Experience taught me not to share even more of myself than I already do share given I’m a teacher. That’s why I tried not to talk about myself, I tried to be approachable but not too approachable, and I only added you all on Facebook after I left the school and was absolutely sure that you can no longer be my students.
But in ways you didn’t see, I think I really still did care way too much. I spent an unreasonable amount of time writing and rewriting my announcements, emails, and feedback so as not to wound. My comments on your essays were essays in themselves. I agonized over every requirement I assigned, checking over and over (on my own but also with my colleagues, and even my siblings and friends) that it was structured in a way that made sense and was useful to you. I wanted you to take my class seriously, but not too seriously. I wanted my class to be a meaningful experience, but not one that weighed too heavily on your academic and personal lives.
Until now, I can’t figure out what to do when I see you outside the classroom or outside school. I’m always trying to gauge the appropriate reaction, but I’m also always so happy to see you. If I look a little panicked or frantic, you’re either seeing my default stressed and frazzled mode or I’m trying to remember your name. I think I’ve said several times that I’m horrible with names, and I feel so guilty that my colleagues seem to memorize your names so effortlessly, and that my own teachers still remember my name after all these years. I kid you not, when I see you outside class and realize I can’t recall your name, I genuinely pull up my class list to review. I do remember some things, like where in the classroom you’re seated (on my left with your blockmates), where in the class list your name is (somewhere around M),or whether you’re in a morning or afternoon class (my last class of the day, and also yours, but your tiredness didn’t show in the quality of your recitation).
In a way, I still try to carry you with me. I already told you that I still think about you when I chance upon things it would have been good to discuss in class, but I also do that in a literal sense. The two origami cats, an amigurumi bee, and a crocheted coaster that you gave me sit on my work desk. A crocheted flower keychain hangs on my lunchbox, and a cat keychain guards the books on my bookshelves. On pages of my journals and planner and in the notes app on my phone, I keep all the funny and profound things you shared with me in recitation or in your essays. There is a box in my room full of all the letters I’ve ever received from you, and even if it seems ridiculous, it was so hard for me to throw away the rubrics for your oral exam midterms, because I wrote down your nicknames on them. (Yet another failed attempt to memorize your names.)
On the last day of the sem, I asked you to write down what I hoped you’d remember about this class. I also gave you a survey on your experiences of this class to document my teaching approaches. But I haven’t read them, not really. I skimmed through them enough to assign bonus points when necessary. I’m hoarding them, happy knowing I have them secreted away in my shelves and in my Google Drive. At the same time, I’m afraid of what I’ll find when I look through them. What if my worst fears are true, and I was a terrible teacher and you thought my class was pointless? But I think that would be just as heartbreaking as finding out that I was a good teacher and that you did have a meaningful experience in my class, and that I made a grave mistake by deciding not to teach for another school year.
Teaching meant, and means, everything to me. I never took this job lightly, even if I tried to temper my idealism so I wouldn’t end up burning myself out (again). I worry I’ve left behind something essential to the person I am and want to be by stepping away from the teaching profession, even if I don’t intend to do so permanently. As I was writing you this letter, some of you heard I’d no longer be teaching this school year and asked me what happened. I didn’t go into detail, because at times, when I think about my decision, I stray dangerously close to something like regret. I just desperately hope that my decision didn’t cheapen everything I said and did as a teacher.
What is my class like, in your memory? I can never know, but in my imagination, it was where you realized what it could mean to see a person as a person and treat them as such. It was where you explored your place in building a more just world. It was where you had a change of heart. That is all I can really ever hope for as a teacher, because no matter what I say or do, only you can make your choices for you.
I only ever wanted the hours of your lives that you spent in my class to mean something to each of you, and for that to make itself felt in the people and situations around you.
This letter is embarrassingly long, and I don’t know how to end it. I feel I’ve said too much, revealed too much. I think I’ll just end it with yet another embarrassing letter, which I left anonymously at an exhibit I visited days before I decided to leave teaching (for now):
To my students —
I know it doesn’t seem like I do, but I care about you a lot. I’m always regretting the things I didn’t do and the things I could have done better. Many times a day, I remember you and it makes me smile. I hope it somehow means something to you to have been loved so clumsily. I don’t know if you’ll know it or feel it though.
— Ms. M.
