The boy's major difficulty with English was that something in his brain no longer connected his thinking with his spelling. He just guessed at how a word should look, and most of the time, even a modern spell-check program couldn't have anticipated his intent. His essays sometimes took me four or five times longer to decipher, compared to those of his classmates. He had no idea how to reproduce the words he read on the written page. His arguments and analyses were perceptive and accurate, if I could figure out the phonetic spelling and alphabet guesswork. In class discussion, literature and group projects, he shined. So I mothballed my red pencil and gave him credit for his dedicated work and fine mind. Not having been in a regular classroom since elementary school, his reward came when he earned an "A" in my class. My reward came four years later when I received his graduation announcement from the University of Utah.

Every year there are students in my classes who conquer their self-defeating habits, their personal obstacles and their enormous teenage insecurities � the cheerleader who, when confronted with cheating on a test in the fall, swore that she would never cheat again in my class and then reported with pride at the end of the year that she had kept her word; the diabetic young man whose determination was so respected by his peers that several of them named him in their essays about personal "heroes" (he died less than two years later); the reporter on my school newspaper staff who battled drug addiction and depression through her sophomore and junior years, and then beat back the dragons to earn a journalism scholarship to a small junior college; the student teacher who had been a quiet member of my junior honors class several years earlier and just last month whispered to me that I was the reason she had become an English teacher.

When I go home from work every day, I know that what I do matters to society. And I am enriched by the countless students who daily share with me their courage, enthusiasm, talent, off-the-wall humor and sheer joy for learning. There isn't a better job, anywhere. — Janice Voorhies, Bingham High

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As the e-mails continued to pour in over the course of a couple of weeks, I talked to Berryessa on the phone. "The thing I found so interesting is that not one e-mail was negative," he said. "They didn't carp about the problems of the job. They were all positive about why they teach. The response has been amazing. I didn't think we'd get that many, especially because this is a busy time of year. All the letters are really from the heart."