WAMS Teachers Receive Laudatory Letter From Former Student T

If teachers ever doubt their abilities in the classroom, they should remember that each day they encourage students to follow their dreams. Below, please find a letter from a former WAMS student to her former teachers:

Dearest William Annin Middle School,

While I may be sending this note to a few specific teacher emails, I’m not too sure where this will be sent and who it will reach. For this reason, I’ll dedicate this letter to the entire school in general.

My name is Kassandra Tate Tidland, and I graduated from William Annin in 2012. You might not remember me too well, and I wouldn’t expect you to. Let me try my best to jog your memory:

I was that girl who feverishly loved writing and reading, perhaps a little too much at times. I rejoiced at writing essays for English. Heck, I actually read the books in English. I regularly dressed up like Katniss from The Hunger Games––Mockingjay pin necklace, hair braided, the whole nine yards. Literature was such a haven for me, unlike anything I’d ever been a part of. For that reason, I always boasted to everybody about how I was writing a novel, as if that already entailed massive success. One of the most frequent things I would tell people, teachers and classmates alike, was this:

“I’m going to be published before I graduate high school.”

When I moved out to California for high school, I started changing for the worst. I wasn’t as open and loud about my love for literature––I had tried to be in the beginning, only to be hit with a whole class laughing at me as a horrible boy drawled, “What, do you think you’re in The Hunger Games or something?” Shortly thereafter, I threw away my Mockingjay necklace and told absolutely nobody that I was a writer.

That, right there, was the worst choice I made in high school. In that moment, I had been ashamed of the person I’d once relished in being.

By telling nobody how I liked to write, I began to forget I liked it myself. I started pummeling every word I typed down. I negatively compared my stories to published ones, giving myself every reason to believe I wasn’t worthy of the goals I used to hold dear to me. By the end of sophomore year, I was thinking about other callings. The writing thing, I’d decided, wasn’t for me after all.

At the beginning of junior year, I decided to give my novels one last ditch effort. I posted the first few chapters of my oldest and favorite work, The Famoux, onto a website called Wattpad. My dad had sent me an article about a girl who was getting her novel published in stores after posting the whole thing serially on the site, giving readers an update once a day. Her name was Anna Todd, and her novelAfter had harnessed an accumulative 1 billion reads. If she could do it, I thought to myself, what was the harm in me trying one last time?

After a month of getting absolutely no where on Wattpad, that same world-famous Anna Todd found my story, out of the millions she could’ve clicked on, and posted about it to her followers. It was an unexpected and incredibly surreal nod that propelled my story from 100 reads to 3,000 in a week. Using the little boost she’d given me, I worked through my horrendous AP classes to post a new chapter everyFriday, and as a result, became one of Wattpad’s most popular writers.

The Famoux has 1.5 million reads today. I have somehow managed to render a pretty substantial and beautiful worldwide following, with Twitter accounts, Instagram pages, Tumblr blogs, and even Pinterest boards dedicated to my story. In fact, I’ve had the utmost pleasure of running into people at concerts and amusement parks who happened to recognize me from Wattpad and wanted take a selfie with me. (You can bet I almost cried in front of them. I always do.)

My novel has remained at #1 on Wattpad’s Science Fiction chart for weeks on end and has yet to leave the top 20 in months. In the largest online writing contest, the Watty Awards, The Famoux won an HQ Love Award, which goes to the novels that are most enjoyed by Wattpad’s headquarters in Toronto. At the start of this year, it was voted the 10th Best Story of 2015 by readers, and was ranked the 2nd Best Romance Story (even though the novel itself is sci-fi with a little romantic subplot).

By the beginning of my senior year I was placed into the Wattpad Star Program, which has given me the opportunity to work with both Sony and Lionsgate through writing for the film The Fifth Wave and helping promote the film Pride + Prejudice + Zombies. I have written a feature article for the website MaximumPop and have been mentioned in articles on Buzzfeed, SModa, and the Huffington Post. I’ve just recently helped Wattpad host a webinar about their partnership with Educator Innovator, a Librarian Association, and the popular art site Devianart, acting as the teen representative for Wattpad as a whole.

Everything I’ve gotten to accomplish in my two years on Wattpad have been grand beyond my grandest daydreams.

But oh, William Annin, that isn’t even the best part.

Remember that thing I used to tell everybody? That thing about being published before I graduated high school?

I am so excited to tell you that IMAGINES, a novel featuring 33 Wattpad writers (including myself) is going to be published by Simon & Schuster on April 26th, 2016. You’ll be able to get it in regular bookstores like Barnes and Noble as well as in an ebook format on Amazon or iTunes. There are a lot of authors on it, so if you flip to the back of the book, you’ll see my name right there, in print. I’m also fairly sure they’re listing the names in alphabetical order, which means that Kassandra Tate will come right before Anna Todd. Yes, the same Anna Todd I mentioned earlier.

It is absolutely amazing to me that in these two years I have gone from being so utterly intimidated by Anna Todd’s success on Wattpad to being published in a novel with her. She finds this just as crazy as I do.

I wanted to take the time and update you on my life because I know for a fact it wouldn’t be what it is if I hadn’t gone to William Annin.

Ms. Roio, you were the teacher who pulled me aside and told me that even though the school announcements only mentioned the top 2 books in the David Lubar writing contest, you wanted me to know I’d gotten third place. That was the first time I ever thought about writing as something I was good at––before, I was simply a reader who didn’t think I had the sort of capabilities to write an actual story of my own.

Mr. Stanzel, you were the teacher who helped me affirm my love of English. You appreciated my opinions on Freak the Mighty and Walk Two Moons, and showed me the importance of symbolism and underlying themes. When I told you I wanted to be an author, you were outstandingly supportive, and never for a second made me feel like my goals were too big for a middle schooler.

Ms. Beykirch, you were the teacher who bonded with me over books. I loved getting excited over The Hunger Games with you, from sharing our opinions on the movie to you giving me a special blackish-red rock that reminded you of Katniss for that test where we had to identify the characteristics of minerals. I’ll never forget letting you borrow my copy of Insurgent so we could talk about it together.

I didn’t see my 8th grade Comm Arts teacher, Ms. Osborn, on the staff directory, so I’m lead to believe she doesn’t teach there anymore. Either way, she once wrote in my yearbook, “I can’t wait to see your name in print.” I have held that near and dear to me for years now.

I cannot thank all of you enough for being with me when I had no idea what my life had in store. Thank you for never letting me believe that getting published before graduating high school was an impossible goal. Thank you for teaching the classes where I daydreamed about characters that now have pets named after them. Thank you for supporting me before anybody gave me the time of day. And, perhaps most importantly, thank you for giving me an A on that paper where I lengthily compared Tom Robinson from To Kill A Mockingbird to an actual, literal banana. I wouldn’t be referred to my readers as “The Queen of Plot Twists” if it wasn’t for crazy essays like that.

If you would like to pre-order Imagines, here is the link from Simon & Schuster’s website: http://books.simonandschuster.com/IMAGINES/Anna-Todd/9781501130809

If you would like to view my Wattpad stories, here is the link to my profile: https://www.wattpad.com/user/famouxx

Again, thank you. I hope your students follow their dreams, no matter how big they might seem. You never know what might happen in 4 years.