Two twelve-hour days later, I’m fucking exhausted, but I needed to get this written down before collapsing into bed, because I genuinely had one of the best moments of my career tonight while talking with parents at the 8th grade Open House. This is a very short story, but powerful nonetheless: one of my dads, on the way out of the room, stopped, looked around for a moment, then came back into the room and told me he really loved the way I’d set up my classroom.

“I was terrible at math as a kid,” he said. “I feel like I could actually have learned in here.”

It’s going to be a good year.