Farewell messages for your teacher

Six messages you could actually send

Continue writing opens that message in the card with the words already in it, so all that is left is to change a word and send it. The last message is the longest of the six, and it is the only one you have to copy across yourself.

1. All the best for what comes next. Half this batch chose their subject because of the way you taught it, and most of us have never told you so. Thank you for all of it, rather late in the day.

   Continue writing with message 1

2. Thank you for everything. We were a difficult year and you never once let us see that we were, which I understand now took a good deal more patience than any of us had earned.

   Continue writing with message 2

3. All the best. I still plan an answer before writing it, exactly the way you taught us to, in work that has nothing at all to do with your subject. Thank you for teaching the method and not just the syllabus.

   Continue writing with message 3

4. All the best for whatever comes after this. You've earned a very quiet morning with nobody asking you a single question. Thank you for the patience, which we tested thoroughly and never once managed to use up.

   Continue writing with message 4

5. Thank you, and all the best. You marked my work honestly when being vague would have been kinder, and that's the only reason I ever got any good at it. I've since worked out how rare that is. I hope the next place knows what it's got.

   Continue writing with message 5

6. All the best for what comes next. You taught us a long time ago now, and there are at least four of us from that one class doing this subject for a living because of the way you taught it. None of us has ever told you that, which seems like an oversight worth correcting.

   Copy

Writing your own

Give them the outcome. Teachers never learn what happened to their students, and a leaving teacher is thinking about exactly that. Four of us are doing this for a living now is the most valuable sentence you can put on the card.

Sign it with the batch and year. On the last day they will receive dozens of these. A name with 12-B, 2016 next to it becomes a person they can actually picture, which is the difference between a card and a stack of cards.