Dear Mr. Dreidger,

You were a phenomenal teacher and it was an honour to have learned from you. You made it easy to address confusion without being ridiculed by our classmates and allowed your students to learn in a safe environment. I learned so much from playing with demonstrations and laboratory equipment in your classes, and you always found ways to bring my natural curiosity into your lessons. It was not just the content that inspired me to want to come to class every day; it was the passion and care that you displayed within the classroom. I would not be the educator and person I am today if I had not had you as a role model.

It was very heart warming to have you tell my parents during a parent teacher meeting that I should go into engineering at university however I knew deep down inside that it was not engineering that I wanted to pursue, I wanted to become a physics teacher so that I could instill a love of science to a younger generation just like you did for me. This September I will have my first class of physics students as part of an online high school. Though it will be a virtual classroom, I hope to develop a community that is as welcoming as the one you successfully had.

I am writing you to let you know how important you were in my pursuit to become a high school teacher. Thank you for opening my eyes to the beauty of science and helping foster my interest in teaching. I hope that our paths will soon cross once again so that we can share our teaching stories over a cup of coffee.

~Iain Braithwaite