10.  “Bucket Lists” should always be works in progress Until winning this award, I would never have imagined putting some of the things I have done this year on my bucket list such as meeting the President at the White House or zip-lining backwards into a lake at Space Camp. I am the daughter of a carpenter from Coventry, RI; my life has been pretty simple and the limelight is not something to which I aspire, but WOW what a year professionally! 9.  Meeting a childhood hero at breakfast is pretty cool This summer, one of the keynote speakers at the Education Commission of the States National…

  Hi Everyone,I have just returned to earth orbit from my eight day mission at Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. What a trip this trip was! It was a literal and figurative BLAST! We worked long days, most of the time starting at 7:30 a.m. and going until at least 10 p.m., but the state ToYs had F.U.N. and were happy to welcome national teachers of the year from Greece, Holland, Australia, the Netherlands, Singapore, Austria and China to our group.I have never attended camp in my life, but here I am turning forty in March and heading to camp in Alabama of all places, and one themed on science…

  The final day of the ECS (Education Commission of the States) national forum on education policy in Atlanta (July 9-11) proved to be pretty darn exciting! The morning session afforded me the chance to meet a childhood hero- Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. I remember being just eight years old or so when Reagan appointed her to the bench and thinking then that it was awesome that a woman was a Supreme Court Justice. I was sure to seek her out and to tell her so. She’s pretty feisty- I love it! And she was very gracious to ToYs like me. My husband, Shawn joked that I finally met a Supreme! She …

  Bill Gates was another featured Keynote Speaker at the ECS (Education Commission of the States) national forum on education policy in Atlanta, held July 9-11. Meeting the gazillionaire computer titan was also kind of a cool way to spend an afternoon. Like Justice O’Connor, he also addressed the whole crowd before requesting to meet with ToYs in a private session later in the day. Yeah, I think we can accommodate you, Mr. Gates.Thankfully, Gates made some very teacher-wise comments, particularly about teacher evaluation. He forcefully cautioned those in the room of the mindset to base …

  A few years ago, I read an article about a team of scholars in England working to locate and verify Shakespeare’s fingerprints on various artifacts and manuscripts he likely held. What captured my imagination most about the article had less to do with my true love for Will Shakespeare and more to do with the idea of lasting impressions and the interconnectedness of people and things through time. My dad had recently passed away and his loss likely inspired this jag of reflection then. As I work now to assemble words to describe my recent trip of a lifetime to Washington, D.C., as the 2012 …