It's Betsy's birthday! Now a senior at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, Betsy remains one of my favorite students/teacher aides/people ever. Happy Birthday, Betsy! This is from November 1, 2010. My student teacher aide, missed school last Thursday and Friday on a visit to Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. With the assumption that she will most likely enroll at the NCAA Division III institution, Betsy plans to major in photography and play on the field hockey squad. (GO TIGERS!- I looked it up!) What's more, she returned to Texas with presents- a Wittenberg t-shirt and a Wittenberg tie! My wardrobe just improved dramatically. But the reason I am ecstatic has nothing to do with newly acquired Wittenberg gear: I get little done when Betsy is absent.
Over the past ten years, I have come to increasingly rely on my teacher aides. I have been blessed with excellent basketball aides, including Fallon, this year's student coach, but their domain is not academic. For the past five years, I've had multiple aides, including the same set (Chelsey and Hanna) for the past two consecutive years. This August, there was heavy competition for the services of these students so I only have one this year, the aforementioned Betsy. She is an incredible helper, unique in her own way as all the girls have been. (I'm a sexist- I only recruit girls for the positions as I think they generally work harder and tend to be more responsible.) Betsy is a great typist, perhaps the best of all my aides. She often types my blog entries as shown above. She also is incredibly creative, as evidenced by her choice of major. I asked her to re-do the classroom bulletin board today and she calculated her plan in a minute or so. She has organized the student drawn artwork on the wall and is helping Kellie Keese do touch ups on our mural depicting the life of Jesus. On the mundane level, Betsy is also good at running errands, recording scores in my paper grade book, and making me laugh every day. In Philippians 2, verse 20, Paul tells the church in Philippi that he has no one else like Timothy in his work. That's how I feel about Betsy. There are days when she makes the biggest difference in my life by her assistance in the forty-six minutes she spends in my room, giving me the chance to be effective in teaching the Word of God. This past Saturday morning, I spent several hours typing college letters of recommendation for a number of our seniors which will be mailed out to various universities in the coming weeks. But I'll give you a preview for one recommendation not yet penned: you just read the best one I could possibly write for Betsy.
Applicable quote of the day:
"She became so important to them that they wondered how they had ever managed without her in the past. And the longer she stayed with them the more indispensable she became, so indispensable in fact that their one fear was that she might some day move on."
Michael Ende
"She became so important to them that they wondered how they had ever managed without her in the past. And the longer she stayed with them the more indispensable she became, so indispensable in fact that their one fear was that she might some day move on."
Michael Ende
God bless,
Steve
Luke 18:1
E-mail me at steve@hawleybooks.com
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