 If you highlight Germany, Japan, and Italy into your control seat, I think teaching in general is just an extremely rewarding profession. Good teachers make you want to be a teacher. At least that's what happened with me. Ms. Dernigan was my fifth-grade reading teacher, and she was just phenomenal. She had a relationship with each and every one of her students. I've never really had teachers like her go into her classroom and make me feel like I had a safe place. If you ever said hello to her, she'll give you a smile that'll make you feel like school is your home. Her passion for the classroom and students and education as a whole, it's just contagious and you can't help but jump on that train with her. The rallies that we have here at North Intermediate were centered around the philosophy that we should celebrate academics with the same enthusiasm and energy that we celebrate athletics. Not only do we recognize students who make the honor roll, we also recognize students who have persevered and made incredible progress. I think it's important to give them a minute to just be kids. Young kids definitely need time to move around, and a lot of them learn in a kinesthetic way. If you can structure your classroom in a way that allows them to get up and move around a little bit and interact with each other, they're going to be more focused and ready to learn. She showed us ways that we could learn language arts and writing better ways than I've ever learned it. I think educators, we really have to shift our focus from being the giver of knowledge to a facilitator of learning. When she came out of the classroom to be our district director of school and community engagement, she was an obvious pick for us. Once I became informed about what was happening, especially at the legislative level and the decisions that were being made, advocating at the state level was not an option anymore. I mean, it was an obligation because those decisions have a direct impact on the kids we serve every day. And that's just the perfect place for her because she knows what it's like to be in the classroom, and then she has a very good relationship with others. People regard her with high integrity. They trust her, and so I think it gives her the ability to bring lots of different groups together. She's a fierce advocate for our public schools in Oklahoma, and she doesn't just talk about it. She does the work. Any time I've ever gone to anything that involves Bigsby Public Schools in the community, there she is. She will organize these trips and get parents and teachers and administrators to travel together to the Capitol so that the legislators can see us as a unified group. We spoke with our representatives and our senators just talking about how we can better education in the state of Oklahoma. We talked about funding our classrooms. She played a role of getting, over the last two years, $650 million back into public education in Oklahoma. She's fighting for my kids, and she's fighting for my friends' kids, and she's fighting for kids that aren't even in our school districts. When I look back and I really think about my students, that's what keeps my energy up, keeps me persevering in this fight for public ed is that they're counting on us, and they are the reason that I'm doing this. It's just something that I won't ever stop fighting for.