Feeling Good

I'm at the Maine Youth Action Network conference in Bar Harbor today. There are about 350 attendees, including middle school students, high school students, and the adults who love working with them enough to endure ridiculously low salaries to do what they love.

Shortly after the keynote (not really very effectively done, but the guy has an impressive record of anti-tobacco activism at the tender age of 19) I ran into a former student who is now a senior at our local high school. She endured three years of me as her science teacher, and one as her language arts teacher, and was a member of my favorite class ever. To this day, every time I see her she exclaims that I was her "favorite teacher ever". That's not a brag, and I certainly don't claim to have done anything to have earned that particular accolade, but I use it to set the scene.

So after hugs and some small talk, I asked her what is happening for her next year. I was flabbergasted to hear she is hoping to enter Pre-Med at UVM next fall. Now don't get me wrong, I wasn't flabbergasted because she has dreams of Pre-Med. And it doesn't shock me in the least that she is considering a very good school. No, it was the fact that this is one of the most intelligent kids I've ever taught, who--though she coasted through my sixth, seventh and eighth grade science classes--I never pegged for being a particularly science-oriented person. She always had a book, and usually it was pretty challenging reading. Check that: she always had a book going, and usually she had it going simultaneously with my lessons. But she was a very capable multi-tasker, and even when I tried to trip her up, she knew right where we were, even in the middle of Return of the King. This is one sharp kid. Anyway, I view it as vindication of my teaching methods that she told me when they did Punnett Squares in honors biology, she had no problem while most of the others in the class simply didn't get it.

It excites me that at least one of my students is going into a scientific field, and I think I had some small part in helping develop her passion for science. That feels damn good.