Hallmark Commercial in my Classroom

If Hallmark ever needs the quintessential sweet boy to do a commercial, they should call me. He's in my class. (I'll call him Ryan.) Every day after school he says, "Thanks for teaching, Mrs. Zubrowski." And every day I answer, "Thanks for learning, Ryan."

Twice this week Ryan has blessed me. The first was a simple note saying "Dear Mrs. Zubrowski, it's really fun being an afternoon teacher. Merry Christmas. Love, Ryan. " ( I knew he meant "having you as an afternoon teacher" but I was thinking, "Maybe one day he will be a history teacher. He loves it!"

As I've said before, I'm teaching a very small, combined class of 5th and 6th graders. I teach US history of the 20th century, among other subjects. This week we've been wrapping up the decade of 1910-20. I had each student choose a person or topic to research, write a short TV interview about (where I'm the host and they're the guest). Well, we did a dry run of the show of Tuesday. I ad-libbed a bit with each one to make the scripts "flow" more naturally. The real show would be Wednesday.

Ryan was millionaire Andrew Carnegie. When I introduced him, I said, "Mr. Carnegie, welcome to The Chatterbox Show. It's so nice to meet you. I bet everyone likes to pick your pockets. " (I ad-libbed the last part.)

So on Wednesday Ryan came in dressed as Carnegie. To the nines! Nice suit and vest, brown velvet hat he'd gone specially to the thrift store to get. In the hall before the TV show started, he pulled me aside and said, "Mrs. Zubrowski, remember yesterday you said, 'I bet people like to pick your pockets' ? Could you please say that again today? I liked it and I brought this little bag of coins I'm going to pull out when you say it." (It was a cloth, drawstring bag of real coins.) So I did, and he did. Fun little touch with a prop.

A little later some of his classmates were asking where he got all the coins and he said he did chores for them. He made sure that if any dropped, he carefully picked each one up.

Near the end of class, he came up to my desk and handed me a penny.

"Mrs. Zubrowski, I want you to have this."

"Well, thank you, Ryan, but you worked hard for this." I examined the penny. "And this is a 1976 coin. Do you know that was a bicentennial year? When I was your age, America celebrated her 200th birthday."

"Really?"

"Yes. Are you sure you want to give away a bicentennial penny?"

"Yes, I'm sure. I like to give my teachers something for Christmas every year, and ...well...I figured you'd like something from the 1900s."

"You are so right about that, Ryan," I said, biting back tears at his thoughtfulness. "I'm going to treasure this penny. Thank you."

"You're welcome. Merry Christmas. And one more thing. Mrs Zubrowski? I think I did really good on that World War I test. And you know what? My dad knows everything about World War II. I mean everything. When are we going to study that? My dad's a World War II nerd. You know what a nerd is, right? It's a good thing."

"I know. And I think you're turning into a war history nerd yourself, too , huh?"

"Yup," he beamed, gathering up his backpack before heading out the door. "Thanks again for teaching."

"You're welcome, Ryan. Thanks for learning."