A Hearty Recommendation

One of these days I hope I climb over the mountain of paperwork and "to do" lists on my desks and actually start to feel like I have a grasp on this school year. In between the scheduling nightmare we've had for the past two weeks where our class rosters are changing nearly every single hour, to the normal beginning of the year paperwork, to trying to get seating charts that work put together, and actually trying to teach, it's been busy.

And then, of course, we had open house.

Actually I kind of like having open house rather early in the year, before the first progress reports show up. Chances are we get better turn out that way. (I still remember the year we had zero parents show up for conferences.)

We did actually have a good crowd, and since the book fair had already opened (and there are some nice science books in there for a change) there was a lot to see and do. I had two pages of sign ups for my parent email newsletter (although some parents were honest and said they don't check email that often) and Mrs. Social Studies said she had about 50 parents on her list, so that's a good number of parents actually showing up.

The best part was actually seeing some of my former students who are now in high school. Many of them come because they have younger siblings going through The School. (It amazes me how many siblings I have this year.) Others come just because they want to visit their former teachers. I had one young man (now a Junior and standing about 6'4") come up to me and give me a big huge hug right in front of four of my new parents.

"I just love you to pieces, Mrs. B," he said. "You're still the best teacher ever."

The parents are standing there, mouths hanging open. "That's a pretty hearty recommendation," one father says with a bit of a laugh.

"Heck ya," says my former student. "She's the best. She's why I'm majoring in geology when I get to college."

I love my former kids.