I decided to give my students a survey about my class and me about mid-way through the year. The majority of the survey was basic questions with check boxes for “yes, kind of, not really, and no.” At the end there were a couple of questions that the students actually had to fill in the answers themselves.

One of the questions was: “If you could describe your teacher in one word, what would it be?”

I looked through them and saw many of my students wrote “helpful,” another handful wrote “nice” (I wasn’t necessarily pleased with this one).

Then, I stopped at one and giggled slightly. Out of all the words in the world, after all the teachings and the lessons, this one student decided to describe me as “beautiful.”

I must be a great teacher.