<p>blurblur, I wouldn’t necessarily listen to the people above. It might be true in some situations, but not always. If your have kept in touch with your 9th and 10th grade teachers over all of your high school career, if you continue to show them papers you write, talk to them about which colleges you want to go to, then yeah, totally ask them to write your recs. For example, both of my teacher recs came from teachers I had had my freshman year (and one of them, my Latin teacher, throughout h.s.). My freshman English teacher wrote the other one, but I had kept in close contact with him–showing him my work, talking to him about my goals, my extracurriculars, etc. He knew who I was and was able to evaluate me. And I got into Yale, Dartmouth, Amherst, Carleton…</p>