I have been an educator for over 25 years and still feel the excitement when I walk into a retail store this time of year and see the large displays of school supplies. It has always filled me with the anticipation and hopefulness of new beginnings.

I have a dear colleague and friend, Anne Cross from Colorado Springs, Colorado who loves teaching, her students, and the wonder that comes with learning. She still remembers as a child the awe she had in school, the vastness of the building, the friendships, the favorite teachers. How wonderfully novel it all is to a child coming to school that first day. And then it struck her, that she as most teachers, have spent a majority of her life in school. That after so many years, it feels ordinary and common. Yet it is the small things that children experience, experiences often that go unnoticed by adults, that create the awe for them. The "simple moments that happen as newness is discovered. Actually, not only discovered, but studied, appreciated and internalized." This she shared, is what's best about teaching and as she was beginning yet another new year, is what she had forgotten in all the madness of preparing for the students to walk in the door, to stop and appreciate. It is what her nephew Max, who was starting his first day of kindergarten, so eloquently demonstrated. Max's mom had joined him for lunch on his first day of many in school. He innocently leaned over to her and whispered, "I made a friend" and pointed to a nice boy name Jake. There's the awe. Those are the moments that cause us to think that all is right with the world. To all the Max's and to we teachers, may we find and remember the awe.