Last Gift of the School Year

Right before the year was done, one of my students, Lila, brought me this gift: a "new" podium. Pretty appropriate for this blog site, huh?

The podium actually has some history. My first year of teaching, this was the only podium that was available for my room. It was blue and crappy and has a huge hole cut in the front (which I later found out was because the previous owner of the podium let the seniors take it every year and "remodel" it and it had housed everything from plants to fish and hamsters...ew), but it was all they could find for me, so I used it. My second year, they found me a better one (you can sort of see it in the bottom picture--on the right--no animals lived in this one), so I stuck the old crappy one in a back room and forgot about it.

This school year we were getting new carpet, and we had to pack up everything in our classrooms. Lila happened to be in my room after school when I was cleaning up the back rooms. She saw the old podium and said, "what the heck is that?" And I answered, "just a piece of crap." And she promptly asked, "can I have it?" And without thinking about it, I answered, "sure." She's an art student so I figured she wanted to chop it up for some projects or something. I never thought about it again.

Then, this past week, she comes walking in my room with the podium completely painted! I was so excited! It's pretty sweet...I will just have to think of something to fill the hole with...and no, Louis does not want to go live in my podium!