Gavin and 30 other seniors were honored with a special banquet at the high school last week. It was to celebrate all seniors who achieved a 4.0 grade average and had taken at least 3 college classes while in high school. The neat thing about the way the event was planned was that the students were actually honoring the teacher that had made the most impact in their lives.
Gavin invited Mrs. Boeckman, his AP European History teacher. He is also a teaching assistant for her this year. He has always loved history, but the way she taught made him love it even more. It was so inspiring to listen as each of the students stood gave a short speech about their teacher. I so appreciated that even though this was a banquet to honor the achievements of these amazingly smart kids, they wanted the kids to see that they are where they are because they had help from people (teachers) who genuinely cared and passed along their passion to these kids along the way. It was a circle of honor and mutual respect. What a beautiful lesson for these accomplished kids to see - you are where you are because of your hard work, yes - but also because others helped you along the way and you must always remember to stop and appreciate those people in your lives.
Even though we were super proud of Gavin, all we really wanted to do was rush out of the banquet because we knew Rob Bell, our favorite author, was at a book signing in downtown Minneapolis and we wanted to be there so bad! The banquet ended at 7. The book signing started at 7. We zoomed downtown and arrived around 45 minutes late. Apparently, he was still taking questions from the crowd when we arrived. We were so far back that we couldn't even see him, but we enjoyed listening. Then the time came for the actual book signing part. Being at the back of the crowd was in our favor because we were practically first in the book signing line.
Gavin really wanted his picture taken with him. The rest of us were standing on the opposite side of the counter from Rob with the book open. I think I got to say like 5 words to him. Gavin was going back behind the counter to get his picture taken with him. When all of the sudden the helper who was taking the picture herded all of us behind the counter. Everything happened so fast, we didn't realize what was happening. Poor Gavin barely made it in the picture. He was rather salty about the whole incident. The whole fam sort of photo bombed his special moment.
We had so much we wanted to say to him and thank him. But we were being rushed out by his assistant. I guess the 100s of other people all wanted the same thing and there is only so much time in a day. But it was the perfect ending to a wonderful and memorable evening.
