 At Horace Mann, we applaud educators' dedication to teaching excellence, ensuring all students receive a quality education. We believe in helping educators find solutions to help them achieve financial success, to live better and retire happier. That's why we proudly sponsor the NEA Foundation Horace Mann Awards for Teaching Excellence to honor educators selected by their peers for their professional excellence and dedication to their students. Please join me in congratulating and honoring the five individuals who are this year's Horace Mann Award recipients. What does this graph tell us? That bacon is a favorite. Alright, it's a bacon. So what does that mean we have to know? We have to do when we go shopping? We're gonna buy a lot. We're gonna buy a lot of bacon. I teach students who are here for various reasons. Some of them have behavior problems. They have difficulty at home. Some of them have arrest records. Some of them just can't function in larger school settings. Our students come to us today with a growing list of needs for a variety of reasons. I had ADHD grown up. I went through some anger issues. I used to be a troubled kid. I had a development delay. The population of students that Afreen works with, success for them comes in small incremental steps and she conveys that to her students. A lot of times the way I grade is I go around the room and if a student didn't get them all right I might look at it and say for this particular child is it important that he knows how to do the word problems on this test and if it's not let him feel success where he can't because to me it's not right or wrong. It's the process. She was very motivational and she helped and not only was her class enjoyable and you can have a good laugh but it was also a good work environment. It wasn't like a normal class. It was more energetic. We should try to make the class interesting. All right. Project time. You want to go first? One of the things that I do in my classroom is to make real world connections. For example I have a student who's really into cars. Eight of them said they like Lamborghini and then I asked all the teachers and they said they like a Jag. So teachers like Jag or Bentley. I try to reach the kids on levels where math lessons are important to them. She understands that we all come from different places, different backgrounds and recognizes the importance for all of us to feel important. There are those aha moments that we all get in teaching. My aha moments is when I'm out in the hallway. It's when the kids go, thank you for talking to me. It's when I get an email from a student saying, do you remember me? I had you when and it was three years ago. I met Mrs. Godi her first year teaching back in sixth grade 31 years ago. She had told us way back in sixth grade that we would end up getting married. She was my, I would say my second mom, I ran to her about everything. When I was upset she'd always talk to me and it really helped me through my middle school years and that's why I still enjoy to this day talking to her. Most teachers I've met, you give them enough trouble, eventually they just label you and they throw you to the side. She won't give up, she wants to build us up, she wants us to rise and do greater things. She fostered what is now my passion. I'm a music therapist because she let me take some of my class periods to go and work with kids with special needs. My now husband had proposed to me in high school and she was just adamant, you're too young, you're too young, you've got to finish high school. She didn't stop in sixth grade when she taught me. She continued to do that. We'll never be able to repay what she's done for me. It's great when they come back or they write to me or I see their parents in the community and they tell me that their kids are doing great and thank me that it hadn't been for you, they wouldn't have gotten through the school. We like to say that we make a difference but that's truly making a difference, not only today and tomorrow but for generations.