Pen to paper, five years later

The return address didn’t ring a bell. The name wasn’t one my daughter quickly recalled.

“Dear Nobel Class of 2003,” the note inside, addressed to my daughter, read. “I hope this letter finds you well. It has been a long 5 years since you have heard from me. Just like I said in June of ‘03, I kept my promise to mail your letter in five years.”

It was signed by Mrs. McKeever, my daughter’s 8th-grade science teacher. Attached was a letter my daughter, now 19, had written to herself when she was 14 and about to graduate from Nobel Middle School in Northridge.

As she read it aloud, memories flooded back -- friends, favorite teachers, the drill team competition at Magic Mountain “where we took second place out of two, but still had fun.”

Her academic goals, she said then, were “to get all As on one of my report cards and get into the college of my choice.”

Her dream job? To work as a backup dancer, an animal trainer or a makeup artist. “I hope I succeed in one of those careers and am happy doing it,” she wrote.

Her signature was flourishes and curlicues; the “i” in her name dotted with a heart.

As she read it, she kept stopping to laugh. And I kept blinking back tears.

Linnae McKeever didn’t get the idea from her teacher training or a curriculum guide. She got it from the “Rosanne” show years ago on TV.

“Rosanne had opened a letter from her high school teacher, and it was a ‘reflection’ letter she had written to herself.” McKeever said. “I thought that would be the coolest thing to do in middle school. So they could see how they changed from eighth grade to college.”

So for the past 10 years, the final assignment for the 200 students in her five eighth-grade classes has nothing to do with science, but a lot to do with life. Write a letter to yourself, with your favorite middle school memories, your career plans and five goals you want to accomplish.

“I wanted them to write from the heart,” she said, “so I promised I wouldn’t read the letters. I’d just mail them off when five years had passed.”

She stores them in a file cabinet, “with a big, fat rubber band around each batch, and a sticky note telling me when to mail them.” And every June, she sits down with a yearbook and highlights the name of every student she’s had that year in class. “So I’ll remember who they are when they show up two feet taller with facial hair.”

It’s a labor of love, she told me on Monday. Most of the students e-mail her back; she enjoys their photos and chatty responses.

Then one year, “I got a really long e-mail from a boy I remembered as a really good student -- quiet, hard-working, kept to himself.

He’d turned the wrong corner in high school, gotten mixed up in drugs, alcohol, failed some classes . . . his parents had kicked him out of the house.

“Reading the letter he’d written in my class was a reflection of what he used to be. ‘Because of that, I’m getting it back together,’ he told me. ‘You don’t know the powers of the letter.’ ”

And once she knew, she couldn’t quit.

My daughter had no dramatic transformation to share. She didn’t become a backup dancer; she’s not training animals or curling hair.

But the small, shy girl with braces who struggled through her science classes is now on the dean’s list at junior college, works two jobs and is pretty enough to be a model.

And though she barely remembers that final assignment, I’m like the boy, struck by the power of the letter.

In middle school our children change before our eyes, and we often have no idea what they are thinking inside. The comments on the report card, the observations at Back-to-School night. . . sometimes we don’t recognize the kids that teachers describe.

The letter reintroduced me to an 11-year-old girl who began middle school crying, worried she wouldn’t make friends and afraid of bullies and ended it tottering across the graduation stage in high heels, showered by friends with kisses and flowers.

And it reminded me of all I owe to the teachers who were my unacknowledged partners, whose kind words and small gestures helped ease her passage. It seems teachers only make news when they do wrong, or win some big award that sets them apart from the throng. But when I think about those 1,000 letters in Mrs. McKeever’s file cabinet and the promise she keeps year after year, I’m glad for those hours every week that teachers like her stand in for me.

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sandy.banks@latimes.com