The Best Moment from Last Week

I was unable to find attribution for this photo.
I found it doing a Google image search for "happy girl." 

Wednesday, April 23

Just a small, nice moment in a teacher's day.

I'm feeling so frazzled lately, juggling so many balls, that time itself seems warped. Is it really the end of the semester?

Right before I teach, I often come up with a "cherry on the cake" type idea for the given lesson I'm about to teach. Now that the semester is winding down, the cherry is for the entire semester, not just one day.

This morning I was really frazzled. So many things to do – pursue health care (which keeps running away from me) – buy half-price Easter candy at Walgreens, prep my upcoming talk on the Shroud of Turin (the talk is now about three hours long). But as I was running around, I thought of something I could do to make today special for one student. I had prepared a game as a review for the upcoming final exam. I thought of a special little gift I could give to the winner of the game.

And then of course I thought, no, this little gift is no good, it's not special enough, I don't have pretty handwriting to write out the card ...

And I just told the negative voices to go fuck themselves and took the leap. Brought in the little present.

So, at the end of the period, and at the end of our final class, the student who won the game got the special gift, the gift I felt so insecure about giving, sure it wasn't good enough, and she screamed, jumped up, and hugged me.

It was the best moment of my day for many reasons, not least of which is I have never seen that student so happy and excited.