I feel good. Real good.

Tonight we had a parent/teacher meeting at school for everyone to come and get their children's grades. The evening started out with an information session on "How to be a better parent" (I'm sure the parents were a little offended to hear that's how the night was starting off...) and then afterwards they came to my class and I just gave general suggestions for improvement and went over some logistical stuff.

Then they all ran at me.

"How's my kid doing?" "Tell me the truth, what's going on" "What about my daughter? Should I be worried?"

It was nice to see parents so involved, it's just unfortunate that the only parents that came and showed such concern were the ones that really didn't need to be there at all. All of their kids are geniuses and have no problems whatsoever in my class.

My favorite moment of the night:
One of the mothers came up to me and started talking to me about her daughter. She started to get choked up talking about how last year was so hard because it was a new school and her daughter didn't make any friends and she could hardly speak any English. All in all it was just a rough year and a hard time for her.
She then told me that before she left to come to school that night her daughter had asked her if she could go ahead and toast and butter her bread and put it on the table to be ready for her in the morning, because she wanted to wake up really early and be the first one in English class and see Teacher Lesa as soon as possible.

Talk about just being tickled to death. It's stories like that that make me so sure I'm in the right place. And the whole night was just a string of parents telling me that their kid likes English class so much better than Spanish class, and that I'm their kids favorite teacher, and that their kid always comes home talking about what they did in English class and how many stickers they now have for good behavior.
I thought my heart was going to burst with joy.

I can't wait to see my kids tomorrow. And I've really come to view them as just that-my kids. They're especially adorable when they're practicing "brushing off their shoulders" and "popping their collars" and chanting "chug chug chug!" to someone drinking a bottle of water.
Oh yeah I'm educating them ;)