When I leave work on Fridays I feel pretty good usually, tired, but happy, and some of the tension I carry throughout the week leaves. The days before holidays are great days at work, days when nothing bothers you because you have time off coming up. Today, leaving work, sitting at home while dinner warms on the stove, I feel absolutely magnificient, like I could do anything, as if the very foundations of the world were gritty underneath my fingernails.

And I owe it all to a student (or perhaps several students). Our school had a staff member appreciation form that students filled out during a week and put in a box for a drawing. Students have been reading the comments on the forms over the p.a. in the morning every day during announcements and today one student read about me. The little certificate I received doesn't matter, the message over the p.a. doesn't matter either really (most kids don't pay attention to announcements anyway), but the forms I received with students' comments did, those forms made all the difference. Those are the forms I will keep in a file and look at from time to time when things get difficult and I get down on teaching, on kids, on myself. But it all started with one student.

One student read about me this morning and she delivered the forms afterward. I sat at my desk and quickly read through them and I started tearing up after reading what she wrote. Some of the forms were funny, some were left by anonymous students, but this one reached me, and even now, just thinking about it and what a great student this person is, stirs my emotions. It has been a long school year, and we have had our most difficult students in the past three years. However, I'm trying hard to think of this as a good school year because there were great students whom we did reach, who did learn from us, who did show up every day and were great to teach every day for 170 some days, and therefore the 2004-5 school year has been a good one, and for students like the aforementioned girl and others like her, I show up every day and recommitt myself to helping young people learn about the world. It is my calling and my passion and I couldn't imagine doing anything else.