Christy Counts, 8th Grade Language Arts and House Leader and Director, Lead Coordinator of our B.A.R.K. (Carver) Afterschool Program, and leader now of our 6th Grade Summer Transition Program at Nathan Hale Middle School, shares this story among many of her students’ memorable summer experiences.

This week they are discussing Ms. Bixby’s Last Day. Determined to give their hospitalized teacher a worthy "last day," three sixth-grade boys skip school and persevere on an impossible quest, deepening their friendship and discovering inner courage they didn’t know they had.

Ms. Bixby was one of the “Good Ones”—the kind of teacher you pay attention to and who pays attention to you. She meant something special to the three narrators in this moving story. Topher, Steve, and Brand.

Ms. Bixby is the teacher who acknowledges the darkness and teaches her students to sing in it. She does this by paying deep attention to the world, gracefully praising courage, cherishing the lovely, and looking carefully: “We all have moments when we think nobody really sees us. When we feel like we have to act out or be somebody else just to get noticed. But somebody notices, Topher. Somebody sees.”

This is not the stuff of mere sentiment; it is the hope all Carver kids hold and will hold all their lives: that somebody will see them. And we do.