Best of the best - my old student Stephen Portillo

Recently, I got an email from a previous student of mine. He wrote this:

"I wanted to inform you that I qualified for the Canada-Wide Science Fair this year! And my project is reminiscent of the one I had when you taught me - instead of simulating an ecosystem, now I'm simulating mass transit networks. And I can definitely tell you all about my project later by e-mail, when I'm not so rushed!"

I was so happy to hear from him. Since I moved to Montreal, I lost contact with my students from New Horizons school in Sherwood Park, Alberta (even though I still have them looking at me from an old class picture - I have it hanging over my desk, with my favourite class looking down at me while I type this). That group was great. We had fun, they were smart, all the kids had great personalities. I found a lot of them through facebook, including Stephen. He was such a modest little boy, but boy was he smart. He must have skipped a few grades, and I know that I was teaching him grade 10 math when he was only in grade 8.

The big thing I remember about Stephen is his passion for programming. I started a programming club at the school. We had a few kids that loved to program, and I gave them problems to solve, etc. Stephen was on top of that and used the lunch hour times to program and design his models. For the science fair one of the years, he designed a computer program simulating an ecosystem. If I remember correctly, at the Edmonton-Wide Sicence Fair that year he got the gold medal.

And now he writes this to me! After four years of no contact, Stephen wrote to me, and asked me if I wanted to come and see him at the Canada-Wide Science Fair. What an honour!!!!

This is really what teaching is about. This is why I'm still a teacher, why I still put up with misbehaving students, with marking, with doing report cards. I know that out of that class of 25 students, two or three of them will remember what I taught them, or somehow I will somehow inspire them, and this will lead to a great discovery, or some turning point in their lives. I know that a few of my students now are going to be the future Stephen Portillo's. I just hope that I don't lose touch with them. I hope I can follow their lives, their successes.

For Stephen, here is how it turned out - he won over $10,000 from numerous awards. Congratulations Stephen. I'm very honoured you thought to invite me, and I am exremely proud of you! You are ment for great things!