 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. Our philosophy, our motto here at Patsy Summer Elementary is that we are developing, inspiring and empowering world-class leaders and lifelong learners, and I would say that Rebethie really epitomizes that. She is always looking for the challenge. Everyone's going to be at their own level of learning, so it's a challenge but at different levels for all the students all the time. My teacher landed across the ocean. She really pulls out the best in the students and makes them really think, but yet she is able to do that with a very fun-loving atmosphere. Rebethie has such a great heart for students and for helping students to be successful and she works really, really hard to make that happen. When you talk to Rebethie and you truly see, you don't just see her heart and hear her passion but you feel her passion for education. I got into teaching because I enjoy learning myself. I worked as a systems analyst and I realized I was teaching everybody how to program more efficiently. You know, people started telling me that I was a good teacher and then I started volunteering in my daughter's school and started enjoying that feeling. One day I just quit my other job and joined Texas State University and went through their teaching program. Now here I am. Rebethie is a very easy read actually. It's a lot of fun, but you also learn lots of life lessons from this place. I think teacher is the single most factor in learning. A good teacher helps you develop that curiosity and helps you appreciate learning and you want to learn more from, not only from that teacher but forever more. You're all talking in secret. There'll be air. There'll be air. Who else wants to try? Stop! Right here. It's really important to have outstanding teachers like Rebethie, not only who can challenge students to learn at really high levels, who can give them the confidence to be able to do that. I just feel that the brain grows only when you're stretched beyond its limits a little bit. So I like to challenge my students. Primarily I think I want them to be curious and I also want them to know that it's really up to them to take their learning into their own hands. That's why I like to start with a blank piece of paper because I like to see what they come with. Ms. Balkushan is a great teacher. She pushes every single one of us. She not only she's just like a student but also like her own family and I like that about her. We would get kind of a free form assignment and she would kind of guide us through it but it was really our own thinking that drove us to new places. We were kind of figuring things out for ourselves. Every time I leave a conversation with Rebethie I'm excited to teach the next day. She motivates me to try something new which puts me out of my comfort zone but I love it because that just makes me grow as a teacher. I feel really lucky to have had Ms. Balkushan and I absolutely love her to death. I see her as like someone who helped build me up to what I am today and I'm deeply, deeply thankful. Yeah, we are too. We're very thankful. I mean I keep telling them one day you won't have a teacher. What are you going to do? Shut down. So here's this class. So what I'm here for is to teach you how to learn so that when people have disappeared from your lives you continue the learning. That's how it is with me.