It’s that time of year: my students are writing their letters to next year’s students. The English 8 kids wrote them last Friday; English I will be writing them in a couple of weeks.

The guidelines are simple:

1. Provide advice for rising eight-graders
2. Show off how well you can write now.

To achieve the second goal, I only allow students one class period to write the letters. The results could theoretically be a little better for the English 8 students if I gave them more time, but part of the charm in the whole exercise is watching next year’s students’ shock when I tell them at the letters they’re reading are in fact first and only drafts.

One young lady’s letter demonstrated so wonderfully how much she’d grown as a person from the beginning of the year. J, at the start of the year, was one of the most worrying students: her behavior was often disruptive; she was often disrespectful when teachers called her on her behavior; she rarely did any work, and what she did was not turned in or handed in still incomplete.

Yet over the course of the school year, she’s calmed down, learned that butting heads with teachers is counterproductive, and begun doing her work (then doing her best). Her grade has gone from a 62 (just barely passing) to a 84, just six points shy of an A.

One paragraph of her letter reads:

How to stay out of trouble in the 8th grade? Staying out of trouble in the 8th grade is probably one of the most important things you can do. One thing you can do to prevent getting in trouble is to minimize your circle and stop posting things on social media. People take a lot of things to social media and the drama leads into school so now it’s the school’s problem and once you post something on social media there’s literally no going back. It’s there forever. Having a lot of friends can cause you to get into a lot of stuff because once one of your friends is beefing with one another they are going to bring you into it because they want you to choose one or the other. My advice to you as a 8th grader right now is to never trust a soul, follow the right path and take it slow, that’s how you can be successful in the 8th grade.

There’s a certain cynicism in that conclusion, but perhaps it’s not entirely awful advice.