Focus. This characteristic is easier for others, but not for me.  School has never been my sort of thing. I don’t like to focus on the boring, I go with the flow and enjoy my day as is. Until I met this old yet young man who showed me the path of staying confident and open minded, this brought me my achievement.  I want to nominate my fifth through eighth grade gym teacher Mr. Christman from North Shore Middle School for this award. He is not only open minded, but easy going and he cares about others success.

Mr. Christman is everything but boring.  He enjoys his day and never looks for the down points.  In middle school, I was a goof off until I got into his gym class . I don’t know why but by taking that first step into his gym changed my mood.  This man let me enjoy his class on whatever we had done each day, whether it's something as fun as playing kickball or something as “boring” as learning about the human body.

It felt as if his whole mood changed mine. This man was a role model in my life.  Every time I would see Mr. Christman, he would be smiling no matter what-- but you know he would have other important things to do.  He always stays on task but does it in his way, his way.

Mr. Christman is energetic, he is happy and he i nice. This man has characteristics people strive to find. Mr. Christman has stayed positive and calm. I don’t remember him ever yelling at one of his students or a student ever bad mouthing off to him.  Maybe I just didn’t notice by how he used his words mixed with the calmness of his voice.  His voice showed me to not be scared of speaking out.  It showed me to use my great lion of a voice.

Mr. Christman would push themselves to do the best they can and to try new things.  I remember he strutted into class all energetic and what not and asked a simple question, “who's up for track and field?”  At this time I thought to myself, “since when has this track thing been around?” I didn’t even know we had this at our school.  So he came to me after class and showed me this list of all the events.  I asked what every event was before I had told him “I’ll think about it and tell you next class.”  So next class had come around and I had told him, “I don’t know I get nervous.”  He then  told me, “How about this, you can sign up now and see everyone there doing it and if you don’t want to we can drop you out.” So I agreed and signed up for long jump. When I got to the meet, there were hundreds of kids, but when it was my turn to go, Mr. Christman showed up and watched me and I got in the top ranks for long jump length.  We were both so happy.  After scores were announced, we were excited.Then he said high jump needs more participants.  I said I would do it but I had no idea of what I was doing.  Mr. Christman said, “just jump” and chuckled.  As I had gotten over the bar he burst into excitement, he was not only my coach but my leader.

From this point on, I knew this man had changed my life for the better. By him being in my life through middle school and teaching me how to keep and open mind, staying calm, staying positive, and taking things one step at a time. He has improved my life and made me more focused and happy.