Dear Mrs. Dauve,

It’s been a year since I sat in your class and built cross sections out of Playdoh and pipe cleaners, or debated the best way to design a shoebox. Those lessons have stuck with me, though — they helped me understand math as more than numbers printed on a sheet of paper. I never expected to like math, but you made disliking it impossible. 

Your class was great, and I learned a lot, but my favorite interactions with you are the ones we’ve had outside of Calculus. Being your TA this year has given me an opportunity to see how much you care about each of your students. It’s remarkable how well you remember everything about all of your students — when they have a soccer game, what colleges they’re looking at, where they want to go on vacation this summer — everything. And the reason you can remember all of this isn’t because you have some kind of crazy memory. It’s because you genuinely care about creating connections with your students in and out of class. 

Students will walk in during your lunch period to ask for advice or share exciting news (including me, more than a couple times). You’re always up to give advice or encouragement when I need it most, and also ready to celebrate with me while I bounce off the walls in your room, excited after getting accepted to a dream college. 

Thank you for caring, Mrs. Dauve. Thank you for listening to my long-winded play-by-plays after a basketball game and giving me the confidence to take risks and challenge myself in and out of school. You’re such a good teacher and such a good person. I’ll miss our conversations a lot next year. 

Thanks for everything,

Hannah Halterman