How amazing, how creative! But I was just trying to get by.

In the many thoughts that went through my head today (is this rocket science, I need to comb my hair, is it spiked...hahaha, dang it I need to get back to work), I found myself remembering a project that I did for my fifth grade science class. The teacher gave an assignment to take a twenty six words from the glossary, one word per letter, and illustrate or find a picture for each one. Then we were to bind it together into a book. We were allowed to make it as professional as we wanted. Take it to Kinkos or whatever, she even showed us a couple of examples. I wanted to do something along those lines, however I one of three children in a single parent household and we didn't have the extra money to throw at a book binding. At the time I didn't have a way to get picture of these things either so I had to figure a way around that also.

Upon looking around the house I found construction paper and crayons. I decided to rely on a skill that I had (though never nourished) and drew all of the images for the words that I chose. My mother, always helpful when it came to homework, decided that since we didn't have the rings to bind it we would instead use some brown shoe laces that she had. Now that I think about it, I have no idea where she got them. I can't remember a single pair of shoes that would warrant brown shoelaces, but I digress. I turned in my book along all of the professionally bound ones. I don't remember being ashamed of what I had. I do, however, remember being slightly unhappy with some of my drawings. But what was I going to do? *shrugs*

A few weeks or so later we got our graded books back. When the teacher got to me she took the time to squat down and tell me that she was extremely impressed by my creativity. She loved that I chose to draw images for all of the words and that I bound the book with shoelaces. She was actually at a lost for words to describe how she felt. I never thought that with all of the spirals that were turned in that mine would be the one that stood out in her head.

I love that my teacher saw an amazing, creative feat when all I was doing was getting by with the resources that were available to me. It's surprising what people notice sometimes.