Did I tell you that I love my kids?

I wasn't sure if I did or not. Because I do. I actually feel a little guilty because mine are obviously the best students in the whole building, and everyone else must be really really jealous. Let me tell you why:
They laugh when they are supposed to. Now, I'm not the funny teacher. The math/ science teacher is the funny one. But sometimes I am funny. When I try to be funny I like people to laugh. I don't think that's asking too much. Sometimes I feel like I am saying something funny, something hilarious, and no one laughs. I hate that. But my kids, my little darlings, they laugh.
The second reason why I love them more than anything is that they participate. They are engaged much of the time. Let me give you an example. We are doing projects on Native Americans. We are filling out a graphic organizer/ study guide thing as we listen to each presentation. After the presentation I would ask for questions from the audience, then I would ask my own questions to make sure that each student got the right information from the presentation, and wrote it down on the graphic organizer. Then I would remind each student to make sure the organizer was filled out correctly. After the 2nd or 3rd presentation, they just took over. They asked all the questions, the presenters didn't wait for me to call on students. They wrote down the answers and I didn't have to double check anything. I could have left the room and they would have just carried on. Perfection.
On Friday, we do our weekly current events. I try to encourage questions, and discussion, and try to constantly lead away from story telling. We still had a lot of story telling, but, I was loving their questions. Even more than the thoughtful questions, I loved when the students had answers available because they actually read the article and understood it, AND, one student not only read the article but he also watched a news segment about it. Multiple sources! I was giddy.