As this blog post is being written Mrs. Olson is currently teaching and entertaining the kids of her new 6th grade class on their first day of school. I (Stephen) wanted to take this opportune moment to break into her blog and make a post bragging about how awesome of a teacher she is going to be and how much work she has put in :)

Hannah has been thinking about nothing other than teaching for the last week and a half. She has been up early every single morning and has worked until late every evening. She even spent a few hours making preparations on her birthday last Saturday. #puredevotion

Aside from hand crafting and writing a post card to each of the 27 students in her class she has: attended many hours of teacher training and orientation classes, prepared lessons, painted letters to put in her class, posted all sorts of maps and pictures and words around her room (which, let me tell you from experience, takes infinitely longer than you would think), made a jigsaw puzzle for the students to put together in order to find out their seating arrangements, taken and posted pictures of the sign language hand signals she's going to have kids use to raise their hand in class, written a lengthy letter to parents giving them all they need to know about the upcoming year, made a class website, come up with 27 jobs for each student to be in charge of in the class, organized all of their materials, and so, so, much more. (I hope reading this list exhausted you so that you can more adequately appreciate the amount of time that has been spent to get everything ready.)

Despite being stressed and constantly worried about how she is going to jump from teaching a one hour lesson (like she did in practicum the last two semesters) to teaching for an entire, seven hour day, for 180 days, Hannah has been organized, excited, and extremely creative. I have been amazed by all of the things she thinks of and how much concern she has for the students in her class before she has even met most of them. I've always admired her creativity and her natural teaching ability and seeing her in her element makes me love her even more. I'm not the only one. This is a real letter that one of her 5th grade students wrote to her last winter during her practicum (a student that is in Hannah's class this year!).