There are two things that you should know about me. One, I have an incredible sweet tooth. It’s detrimental to my health and hips but I struggle through and have learned to appreciate my curves. My dentist isn’t so happy. Two, I have a sensitive nose and can smell really well. That second one didn’t come in handy last night.

It’s rare for me to lock my bedroom door but it closed just right when I went to bed so it locked easily. That’s why my son had to call me on my cell phone while he was standing outside my bedroom door.

“Mom. It’s Mason. Can you hurry up and unlock the door?”

The clock read 3:15 and I assumed he meant the front door and that he’d lost his key and was just getting home. He was standing outside my door when I opened it and I still didn’t have my glasses on yet. He is a formidable figure standing tall and broad-shouldered. It’s a good thing I wasn’t groggy or I would have thought a stranger entered my house and then my body would have triggered quickly into karate / self-defense mode and I would have kicked that poor kid’s butt.

“There’s a really bad, scary smell coming from downstairs. It smells like we’re having a fire.”

I ran back to my bedside table to feel around for my glasses and hurried downstairs with him. Immediately, I opened up the dishwasher from last night’s load to see if something plastic had gotten stuck and started melting. But no bad smells were coming from there so we ventured into the basement and were hit with a worse smell. I wondered aloud, “What do electrical fires smell like? This is HORRIBLE.”

When we opened the furnace door we were hit with smoke and realized we were in trouble. No fire yet, but the smoke was overpowering. He grabbed a tissue and some rubber bands and made the most hilarious looking mask for his face. I wish I were more lucid to have taken a picture, but honestly I was just scared. My mother was upstairs in her room asleep. How long would it take to get her to remove her breathing machine and wobble down the stairs when she is as sick as she is? My other son was sound asleep. My nephew, who is 10, was asleep as well.

Finally, we decided to call the fire department and when I asked, “What’s the number to non-emergency? It’s not like this is a full blown fire.” Mason looked at me like I was crazy.

“Uh. Mom. I think you just call 911.” He started laughing at me not realizing that there ARE non-emergency fire and police numbers. When we got ahold of them we begged them not to wake our neighbors at this hour and please come with no lights or sirens. They did. And they were fast. (Well done, SFD! I’m proud of ya!)

Two trucks came and so did the newspaper carrier. It was a ridiculous sight this morning. It was barely 3:30 when Mason shared with me that he had gotten up to eat some pie.

My genes are strong. He has the sweet tooth mark upon him. When he returned to the kitchen around 3 to check and see if he left the pie out he smelled it. But he said it was also the dog, Lola, who scratched at the door to make him think he had to let her out of his bedroom for some reason. She is not the middle-of-the-night-peeing-dog thankfully. The pie he desperately wanted to eat was a lemon icebox pie that I made  a few weeks ago for the first time. In fact, I mentioned it on Twitter and some friends decided that they were going to crash my house to try it out. Sidenote: stop mentioning how great a cook I am on social networking. KIDDING, ALEX AND DESHANEE. I love y’all. After pie they even dragged me to a movie so it turned out to be a fun night.

Mason had gotten the pie out of the refrigerator to cut himself a piece. When he woke up later he wondered if he had forgotten to return it to keep it cold. That’s when he and Lola went exploring downstairs to see what the smell was.

So. The firefighters came and called another truck (with a ladder! yay! this is a real adventure!) to bring a powerful fan in to blow into the basement to help relieve us of the smell. I even knew one of them as he was walking through my front door. “Hey, Kelly. How are you?” Sweet guy. “I’d rather not be up right now, but there’s no fire and just smoke damage so actually I’m doing very good.”

My nose failed me last night because I didn’t smell a thing and the smoke alarm would have gone off sooner to alert me, but Mason was already awake. I keep thinking how that kid has been with me during some potentially tragic situations. The last time it was when we had an earthquake two summers ago and he actually wasn’t supposed to be at my house that night, but he stopped by anyway because he was with friends who lived close to me and he didn’t want to make them take him to his dad’s house.

My sweet tooth and the powerful DNA that I passed along to my son is what saved us.

You want the recipe, don’t you? Here it is, because it might save your life, too:

Mix 2 cans of sweetened condensed milk

6 egg yolks

1 cup of fresh lemon juice.

Pour into a graham cracker pie crust, back at 350 degrees for 15 minutes and then chill for 6 hours in the refrigerator. It’s the perfect summer pie because you only use your oven for a short time. It’s important when it’s this hot out.

I love my children and my family and want to keep them safe. We are waiting for the A/C guy to come out to the house and fix the motor that blew so that we can have air conditioning today. The weather report is already calling for it to be unbearable and I’d hate to have to move everyone, especially my mother. And yes, by 4:00 am this morning I grabbed a cup of coffee and a piece of that lemony life-saving pie. It was the only thing I could do lest I collapse in a weeping heap on the floor. I know it’s expensive to fix this and then on top of that to get emergency smoke damage cleanup companies to come out to clear out the smells. I’ve already installed every single Glade plug-in room freshener that I had and even had pancakes just now to see if cooking those in the kitchen would help the smell. It hasn’t made a dent. Everything still has a distinctly fire-y smell that is plastic-y and burn-y and I am anything but happ-y.

Next time, I’m making pecan pie. We’ll see if that wards off bears and zombies or the occasional tornado.

Several weeks ago I was asked to be an adult participant at one of my former middle schools at their Challenge Day. I had dropped by the school a few weeks prior to Challenge Day and was asked if I would like to be a part of it.

“What is it?” I asked the dean of students who presented it to me.

“It’s hard to explain, but your name came up when we were thinking of who we wanted to invite. It was on Oprah. Did you see that episode?”

“I’m not an Oprah watcher.” I admitted. I didn’t get into all that.

“Well, it’s a nationally recognized program where it’s one day when these two trainers come in and train the adults for 30 minutes before the kids show up. It’s got a lot of activities and it’s meant to help deal with the problems and issues kids have. There is tons of energy and group talking time and we’ve been told to provide all the tissues. Look it up online if you want. You’ll find more information there.”

At this point I was mildly scared but also intrigued. How would these kids, strangers to me and I to them, bond over the course of a day and come to trust me enough to tell me their deepest kept secrets? What could this possibly entail?

I’m glad I wore yoga pants and my running shoes that day. I needed them for all the wild, frenzied physical activities. Dancing, playing volleyball, and basically running around to introduce myself to 100 7th graders who thought that all the adults there had consumed a case of energy drinks that morning in order to be this excited. It wasn’t our fault. The group leader who trained us told the group that whenever they mentioned the phrase, “We’re getting ready to play another game!” we were to act as if we won the lottery or found out that we were going to be the special guest on Oprah or as if we were on the tv show “Extreme Makeover” and we had to show the same excitement those families show when they announce for them to Move. That. Truck. We all did it willingly. Jumping, screaming, clapping. Honestly, we looked like crazed lunatics and wouldn’t you know? It worked. They teach us that in order to get really deep with their feelings we first have to take them really high with our energy.

I regret, however, that I wore mascara that day. Because the tears from everyone flowed and dribbled like a raging river that seemed to have an endless supply of rushing water. It was my own fault, though. I mean, they told us that they’d provide the tissues. I should have known that the waterworks of tears would surge forth.

We’re not supposed to talk about what was discussed that day because it is intensely private and we can’t break confidentiality. The kids in my small group opened up immediately during their concentrated 2-minute talk time. No one in the group is supposed to spend that time speaking except the one who has the floor. There was to be no validation of their feelings, no fixing of their problems, and no interrupting. We all held to that rule. Only one girl spent the entire 2 minutes in tears. She never spoke about what it was she could have shared with us and the other adult leader and I simply offered her tissues and knee pats and it’s okays when we could. There were four kids in my group. Matt, the only boy, was incredibly forthcoming during his 2 minutes. He was such a spaz during the earlier activities that it surprised me as to how sensitive and vulnerable he became.

The games were frenetic and intense. We played a game of volleyball with an enormous blow up ball and the kids, split into two teams, had to stay seated the entire game. Adults lined up around the outside and pushed the ball back into play. We got points for catching the ball and holding onto to it if it came to us and that was hard because the ball was incredibly huge. There was a halftime show where the adult teams had to create a “show” to earn points. Since we only had 30 seconds to come up with it we decided to do the Stanky Leg while they played the song for us and it had been a long time since I made a complete fool of myself in front of strangers, but the kids seemed to love it. They laughed at us and snapped their fingers to the beat and even tried to do the Stanky Leg while they were seated. Let me pause here to say that it looked very much like having a seizure while sitting cross-legged on the floor. None of it, truly, was very pretty to watch. Funny, yes. Pretty, no.

Toward the end of the day we did an activity (a game, and yes, we screamed and clapped and jumped up to express our enthusiasm) that was, apparently, something they did in the movie version of the book “Freedom Writers”. The speaker puts a long piece of tape down the middle of the gym floor (have I mentioned that this took place in a hot, stifling, sweaty, stinky gymnasium?) and reads a series of statements. I believe that it is simply called the Line Game. The statements began benignly enough and became more intense as trust amongst the group members increases. By this time of the day, however, there was an incredible amount of faith in the group.

There is no talking during this ‘game’. No laughing and no joking. If the statement that’s read applies to you, then you simply move to the other side and face everyone who hasn’t moved along with you. In order to provide support we were instructed to show love to those who moved to the other side of the line. Whether it was a smile or a nod or even the sign language for “I love you”, we were to just support. When you’re on the non-moving side and you stay where you are because the proclamations don’t apply to you, then you hold up the “I love you” sign. It says it all. I’m here for you. I see you. I got you. I love you.

It shocked me to see some kids and adults moving across the line. Some of the adults I know as colleagues and I had no idea about the things in their lives that set them to become a moving member of “Challenge Day” and cross the line.

Cross the line if you’ve ever experienced the death of a close family member.

Cross the line if you’ve ever been scared in your neighborhood or even in your home.

Cross the line if you’ve ever heard gunshots.

Cross the line if you’ve ever been homeless.

Cross the line if you’ve ever been bullied. Or even if you have bullied someone else.

Cross the line if you’ve ever experienced abuse.

Cross the line if you’ve ever lived with violence.

Constant movement is going on during this ‘game’. Some people go back and forth multiple times and there were moments when my brain registered the thought, “Safety in numbers” as I watched the bravery and vulnerability of these people. Not just these kids. Or these adults. But, these people. There were tears and sometimes when people moved to the other side a friend would put their arm around them or hold their hand. And, of course, there were signs of “I love you” coming across from the other side. What we all learned was that we have more in common that we thought. You have to reveal some things about yourself in order to see that standing next to you is a person you may have bullied or teased or ignored or been mean to for no good reason. You have to admit your experiences and step out there. Everyone might know, when you do that, that you have shameful episodes in your life and that you have encountered pain and suffering. It is a woefully absent practice in empathy and it’s powerful.

Like everyone else, I moved back and forth across the line. There were times when I didn’t move and stood in my place holding up the “I love you” sign to the kids and adults standing across from me.

There was only one statement for which I was the only person who didn’t move. Everyone else moved over the line and stood there facing me, but I couldn’t lie or fake it, nor would I choose to do so. It surprised me somewhat that I stayed there and it’s not as if there is a lot of time to think deeply about my choices for staying right where I was. Two of the adult friends I knew there, Jenni and Sara, were really the only people who knew why I didn’t move. They both cried while looking directly at me just like I did when I previously saw them on the other side. Do you know that look people give you when they are sorry for what you’re going through? They gave me that look. Even Matt, the young boy who met me mere hours before, saw me standing there alone. He wasn’t directly across from me, but he moved to get there and pushed his way to the front so I could see him. When he arrived he firmly planted his feet and forcefully held his hand up in the air.

“I love you,” he said. Jenni and Sara said it, too. Many other people, mostly strangers, said it as well. They said it with a sign and didn’t speak it out loud at all.

Cross the line if you ever got to have a childhood and be a kid.

I couldn’t move from my spot and I couldn’t cross that line. It wasn’t true for me. I’ve been responsible for so long that I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have burdens and liabilities and functions to perform. Someone else always comes first. Things need to be taken care of. I’ve never known a time when there wasn’t something to do. The I’ll take care of it gene is entirely too strong in me. Be the adult and do the right thing permeate my fibers. And it annoys the shit out of me. Nothing can be done to undo it, either.

But it was healing, even if it was just a little bit, to admit it to them. And it’s a little bit more healing to write it here and share it with you.

Lately, my posts about education are getting more and more frequent. There is also, of course, the creeping in of posts about pregnant girls that lead naturally back to my own pregnant teen years. It’s hard to miss that the word “years” was plural. The more I do that the more I get questions (via email or messages) about whether or not it’s okay that I write about my work. I’ve been called “gutsy” and “brave” for writing about my job and people wonder how I fly under the radar at work. Truth be told, I’m not under the radar. Plenty of people know about my blog and read it. Including the superintendent. I mean, I don’t think he hangs on my every written word, but he brought it up to me recently at a dinner with book publishers we both attended. Every boss I’ve had knows about it because I just go ahead and throw it out there.

Hey. I write. On the Internet. With readers. It’s very Internetty. Don’t worry if you don’t “get it”. I also write using lots of parenthetical statements, so just ignore me if that’s not your thing. (But don’t lurk forever.) (Lurkers who never comment freak me out just a little bit.) (Especially if they only like to email me their comments.)

I’ve been asked recently if I’m worried about losing my job, but not because of the writing. Just because of all the things going on in education. For instance, there’s the Rhode Island superintendent who just fired all the high school staff due to low test scores. Or the letter from Bill Maher calling for the firing of parents, not teachers. To say that education is a battlefield right now is not giving the issue its due. But parents are pissed. Teachers are scared. And students are, as usual, getting shortchanged. Our own district has proposed budget cuts that calls for 50-some teachers not being offered a job again next school year in their current positions and having all administrators (including yours truly) take a salary freeze.

Personally, that last one will hurt. Quite a few people are dependent on my salary including my children and my mother who is without health care – the other hot issue at the moment. Apparently, some people think I make too much money but that’s not really the point of this post.

Whatever option comes our way out of the four that are proposed by federal government (1. closing the schools, 2. using a restructuring/transforming model by replacing the principal, 3. firing all staff and rehiring up to 50% and 4. becoming a charter school) will hurt. It’ll be a hard pill to swallow because we don’t choose to leave students behind. Many of them come to us already behind and our job, without the aid of the community or any planned social structures, is to bring them up to speed.

I could go on and on about how teaching is hard. There’s no doubt about that. Some stories help spur me on like the Englewood Urban Prep Academy for Young Men in Chicago because it’s about digging in and doing EVERYTHING POSSIBLE to make students successful. It’s not beyond our reach, it’s just that we, the collective “we”, don’t want to do that work because we get caught up in protecting ourselves.

This is not a popular opinion. I’ll get lambasted for saying it because it will appear like I’m insensitive to teachers.

If you’re in this business of schooling students then I hope you know we’re in this together. We get what we get. Parents aren’t keeping their better children at home. They’re sending us the best they have. What we see when we get them isn’t what we’d like to see.

If you’re going to go into teaching you’ll get unmotivated, hard to like students who have short attention spans. Your content that you teach won’t be relevant to them. They won’t care one iota about it. They’ll be disorganized and selfish. When you mention that you have to get through the body of knowledge and standards and benchmarks their faces will turn blank and they’ll just keep blinking until you say something that matters to them. The fact that you have units to get through and tests to give are not what keeps them up at night. Your lesson plans are not their concern. Your homework will be completely uninteresting to them. Your lengthy lectures will not necessarily inspire them to turn their lives around in a split second.

I’m terrified that schools are doing business the same way and expecting different results. Or maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re resigned to the fact that the blame starts and ends with the students and their parents.

I’m absolutely worried about my job. Probably not in the same way you think.

It was a whirlwind day and yet it was entirely typical of what happens at our high school. In most high schools, probably. I just thought it was worthwhile to put this day down as an official mark that this is what regularly happens.

First thing in the morning my secretary called me on the radio to tell me that I had a visitor. This could be anybody. Former students, current students, teachers in other buildings who are visiting and wanted to drop by to say hello. It was Janelle. Janelle graduated early this year so I never get to see her (or her growing belly) (which has completely shrunk, that little stinker). She brought her month old daughter and wanted to show me that she had all ten fingers and all ten toes. Of course, I said, “You know I’m going to hold her, right? And smell her? And kiss her? And then I’ll steal her.” She laughed and looked at me sideways. I’m always joking with her. She never takes me seriously but man, did I want to put that sweet baby in my purse and take her home.

While Janelle was there, Dakota walked in. He’s been gone from high school for almost two years now and when he left he was carrying around an extra 60 pounds, but he went into a military program, shaped up, got a job, and also has a new baby. When he left us he was a mess. He’s getting it all together now. He knows I’m proud of him so he keeps coming back for reinforcement. I’ll give it freely.

As I’m walking out of the office after visiting with them both I see Annie. She’s been my office assistant in the past and I never get to see her anymore. “What are you doing in here?” I ask. She tells me that she got kicked out of class for no reason. It’s always NO REASON to hear the students tell it. “There’s more to that story,” I say. “No, there’s not. She kicked me out for saying ‘crap’ so here I am.” This doesn’t sound like it’s going to end well and I can see that I will probably work for at least 20 minutes to get the full story out of her. “Come on, Annie. Just saying ‘crap’ doesn’t get you kicked out of class.”

I put my hands on my hips, look at my watch to indicate that I don’t have time for all this, and she caves.

“All I said was that this class was crap and she told me not to say that word and I’m like, what! It’s not a bad word! And she’s all, oh yeah it is, and I’m like fine, then crap crap crap crap crap.”

I turned on my heel and walked out of the office, sighing loudly to voice my displeasure at her silliness.

In the hallway, Drew stops me to ask if we can have a Jedi Day at school. “What for? What’s the purpose?” Drew tells me there’s no reason. He just likes Jedis. Drew is the best kind of student. He’s funny and always joking. I can’t imagine where he’s going with this. He says he wants to use Jedi moves on the teachers, too. “This is not the grade you’ll give me,” he joked. “See how awesome this could be? LET’S DO IT.”

I turn on my heels again and keep walking down the hallway, but I’m chuckling at him.

By lunchtime, I’ve written four letters of recommendations, visited six classrooms, dropped off an evaluation to a teacher, and loaned money to a student. I’ve also been roped into buying raffle tickets for some sporting events and one chicken dinner. This is why I’m always broke. While I’m in the lunchroom, I see a girl that I’d noticed earlier in the day and I wanted to tell her how much I liked her outfit. She has on green earrings. As I’m wandering around the cafeteria monitoring students I see her and saunter over to her lunch table. Her friends see me approach and get that nervous AN ADULT IS COMING THIS WAY look so I quicken my step and see that she’s texting on her cell phone (a no-no) so I smile wickedly and say, “Well, I was going to come over here and give you a compliment, but not now. Nu uhhh. Nooooo way.”

“Nooooooooooo. Please? Give me the compliment. What were you going to say? Please?”

“I was GOING to say that you’re just the perfect student and you do everything right, but not now.”

“Come ON. Tell me tell me tell me.”

I determine that she needs a compliment. I give it to her. Then she tells me she won’t be on her phone ever again. I ask what grades she’s getting in class. She says, “Oh, you must already know about that C- I’m getting in Chemistry. I’m working on it. I promise. It’ll be a B before the end of this quarter.”

After lunch I watch the coordinator of a Teen Parenting group walking upstairs with three girls. One of them, Elyse, has come to my attention recently because she’s normally a hall wanderer but I have taken an interest in her now that I notice her growing belly. Her records state that she’s missed upwards of 50 days of school this year but she’s managed to pass 4 out of her 7 classes. How does that happen? I shake my head at trying to come up with an answer to it.

Elyse and I connected last week when I casually asked her why she’s still here in high school because she doesn’t appear to want to be in school. Most of the time the profile for students like her (not the pregnant ones, just the apathetic ones) end up in an alternative program. Defiantly, she tells me that she is NOT an alternative kid.

“I don’t need to be frisked every morning before school. I just can’t seem to want to get to class.”

It broke my heart when she said that, so I confided in her that I was really pulling for her and would do what I could to get her the help she needed. There’s no way she can trust me enough yet, but the interest is there. The seed is planted. I’ll water it when I can.

Elyse and two other girls (the other girls are already parents, but are no longer pregnant) need to get passes back to class and since I’m heading in the direction of my office I offer to take them, get their passes, and send them on their merry ways. As I’m writing passes for them I say, “Boy, I wish I had this kind of program in high school where I was encouraged and taught to be a mom. Know what my counselor said to me?”

“What?” they all ask in unison.

“She told me I should probably go to cosmetology school since I made a “mistake” and would need to get a job and wouldn’t amount to anything.”

They all gasp. One of them pouted and cocked her head to the side. “Awwww,” she says. “That wasn’t nice.”

“I know. It’s ok. Guess how old my Mistake is now?”

“How old?” they all ask loudly. By this time, they’re excited by this conversation. I’ve got them hooked. They want to know how it all turns out, like watching the beginning part of a movie and wondering what the end brought.

“23, almost 24. And guess what else? I went to college WITH my kid and then when she grew up she went to college. Don’t lose sight of what you want, ladies. You can have it, but you have to work for it.”

I’m finishing up the passes that I’m writing for them and they’re desperately searching all the photos on my desk and the degrees and certificates I have plastered on the walls. That’s purposeful because students think that we’re all just magically here at work in education as if we didn’t do anything to get here. Whenever I’ve mentioned teaching English in the past they exclaim, “You used to TEACH?”

All my time could be spent talking to students and checking in with them and being there for them on an intermittent basis. It’s not all I do, but these stories can’t really be told by anyone who isn’t here to connect with them. These things don’t exhaust me all the time and I was, in fact, energized by my interactions with students. They might come back someday and bring their babies to me and show me their degrees and tell me what kinds of things they’re doing. They might go off and I’ll never see them again. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the waiting and a lot of hope, too. I don’t know the answers to what they’re dealing with now nor will I be able to fix anything. It is what it is and in the meantime, we all work, never knowing the outcome.

Crap crap crap crap crap.

Not long ago I shouted from the rooftops about a student who has just ripped open my chest, reached right into my heart, and grabbed ahold of my beating ticker. She is more than a thousand kinds of amazing. I get to have the luxury of complaining about my job, but I have a job so I know I should stop doing that. I also have the luxury (or curse? is it a curse?) of really enjoying some parts of my job. For instance, a former student stopped by yesterday to show me her new baby. She let me squeeze her bundle of joy and smell her and I kicked off my shoes in my office and got right down on the floor to enjoy this new life. To an outsider, it looked as if I’d lost my mind but this is what babies do to me. I’m extremely happy for her and I keep encouraging her to continue her education.

“I’m going to give you some advice,” I said. “Are you listening?”

She nodded and smiled a knowing smile that said You ALWAYS have advice.

“Sleep when the baby sleeps. Smell her and cuddle her and give her massages after her bath. Read to her every single day. Possibly sing to her. Can you sing? Do you have a decent voice? It doesn’t matter. Do it anyway. She’ll know she’s loved.”

I was a high school parent myself. By the time I graduated high school my daughter was three years old. (Don’t. I know what you want to ask me. The answer is I DON’T KNOW HOW I DID IT.) Why did no one  at my school ever give me this kind of advice? It doesn’t matter anymore because I learned it on my own and did it anyway. I probably talked to Mallory like she was an adult and not a baby which made sense to me at the time and explains why she’s always been a little adult even as a 1st grader.

My recent post was a direct result of me worrying about telling these stories about students and I think, after listening to the advice in the comments, that I’m over it. How will people ever know, I wonder, about the magnificent human beings we come in contact with if I don’t highlight these jewels of my work day?

There are these kids, these students, that just jump right off the page of life into every spare moment of my life. Lots of them. I have all these little notes stuck everywhere.

There’s the kid who says, “Good morning!” to me every day and nods his head ever so slightly as to resemble an Englishman heading to Sunday church. Cracks me up. I don’t know why.

There’s the kid who checks out my outfits every day and gives the “Yeah, I like” or the “Nah, it’s not workin’ for you” look. I tease her about giving me crap now.

There’s the kid who has a pronounced limp and a killer smile. He’s happy in life despite physical limitations.

There’s the kid I say hello to and on occasion he responds. Mostly, he ignores me because I know he’s just sad all the time. Twice now he’s reached right out to hug me. I don’t know what that’s about but he needs something.

There’s the kid who comes to visit my office daily who likes to harass me about putting him in the “hard classes”. (To which I just smugly respond, “YOU’RE WELCOME. YOU’LL THANK ME SOMEDAY.”)

There’s the kid who beckons me with her finger when I visit a classroom because she wants me to sit by her and help her understand the text. Even when she already understands the text.

There’s the kid who talks to me about her favorite coffee that she brings in her thermos every day.

Here is Clarissa’s story. For once, I’m not using a fake name because it’s a story published with her permission in the newspaper. It also happens to be a story of a friend, Tammy, who taught with me at a middle school ten years ago. My teaching experience has been a lucky one in that I’ve met some incredible educators who turn into friends for life. (Also? For some reason a lot of my teacher friends are named Tammy which is why I call them all by their last names to avoid confusion. It makes us all sound like a bunch of gym teachers.)

There are just these amazing kids I get to teach and guide. I’m listening to them. I hope you will, too. Don’t miss it.