The only time I was ever excited to go to school was in the summer. Not for summer school, but for the day the class lists were posted on the outside of the front door. It was the day I found out if I got the teacher I wanted or if my friends were in my class.

When I saw the list the summer before third grade, I didn’t know what to think. Being the oldest, I didn’t have another sibling, so I didn't know Mrs. Chmill. But as the year went on, I realized how much I liked her.

Third grade is a year I will never forget; it was the best year of school. It may be because I had all of my friends in my class, or because I got to do the “Tilly the Tooth” play, or even because the sled dogs came in. But I think the real reason is because I had the greatest teacher at Hartland South Elementary School.

Mrs. Chmill, my third grade teacher, was a tall, brown-haired lady who drove a light blue car. She was a friend, a mother, and a teacher. She stopped at nothing to insure our academic success. Her enthusiastic, approachable, and fun personality made me want to come to school everyday. We would do the usual—reading, writing, math, science, and social studies—but she always turned learning into games.

I had no idea what an idiom was until third grade when Mrs. Chmill would put one on the board every week, and we would have until Friday to crack the idiom and to place our guess in the bin. We even had paper gumball machines glued on the wall for when we played minute math games. She would test how fast we were at our math facts, and when we passed a level, our gumball would go down the machine and we would get a little pack of sugar free gum.

Mrs. Chmill is a mother of three kids and once a year, they would all come in and play a game of kickball with us. Mrs. Chmill even played with us! In between subjects, Mrs. Chmill would always have little conversations with her students so she could get to know them better. I remember one day a few boys in our class told her yellow makes her look skinny. She then wore a yellow sweater every Friday after that. These things made Mrs. Chmill seem like a friend and she was the closest teacher I have ever had to being a friend.

I was even lucky enough to have Ms. Chmill as my seventh grade math teacher at North Shore Middle School. From third grade through seventh grade, nothing really changed. She was a teacher I went back and asked questions to. Especially in eighth grade, I would go back almost every day with questions about eighth grade algebra.
Ever since I saw Mrs. Chmill’s name on the window before third grade and on my schedule in seventh grade, I have been excited for school.