I'm not bossy...I'm a leader

When Alison was two-years-old she spent most of her daylight hours under the tutelege of Miss Debbie, a mountain of a woman whose size was outmatched only by her attitude. We ALL did what Miss Debbie told us to do. One day, she observed Alison playing with a group of other toddlers and apparently taking direction of whatever they were doing. "Alison, are you being bossy?" Miss Debbie enquired, no doubt with hands on her hips looking down from on high. Ali looked up at her, shook her head and said quite firmly, "No, Miss Debbie. I'm not bossy. I'm a leader." I did not witness the exchange, but did get it straight from Miss Debbie herself. I'm not sure she was as proud of her as I was, but I'll never forget how she was just shaking with laughter as she informed me of the day's events.

Flash foward to this week when I'd asked Alison to be in charge of collecting sentences, including a sentence diagram, from the kids in her 5th grade class. The sentences were to tell Mr. Feeser why each student thinks he's awesome. She then was to place them in a big card we'd gotten him for his birthday from all the parents and kids in his class and give it to him Friday. We got the card and she lost a day of getting the notes collected. On Thursday, we were leaving the school and I asked her how she was progressing. "Well, the kids weren't paying attention so I asked Mr. Feeser to step outside for a while," she explained. I tripped a little bit on the parking lot. "You did what?" "I asked Mr. Feeser to step outside for about 15 minutes so we could do something," she said, unconcerned. "You told your teacher to leave his classroom?" "Yeah." "Did he do it?" "Well yeah," she said, finally looking at me as if I was a dork. "So then Sarah and I gave everyone a card and had them write their sentences. We helped some of them with the classification (that's what they called sentence diagramming now.) "Where was Mr. Fesser?".

She shrugged. "I dunno. So anyway, Ryne was NOT paying attention and that made everyone else not pay attention. Mr. Feeser did open the door and tell us to quiet down once." "So did you get them all done?" "Yep." Now, I'm 100 percent sure that Mr. Feeser was standing outside the classroom door the entire time, probably eavesdropping on what was going on. But how cool was that? She kicked her teacher out to get her little chore done. I think middle school is going to be quite the adventure.