I have a student with the name “Faith.” As is customary, prior to my team’s meeting with her parents to work out a plan for her scholastic achievement, I emailed the entire school staff to invite other comments. As I had just emailed about another student’s parent conference, I wrote in the email subject line, “Faith, too.” I received one reply, from my colleague D, who wrote, “I have that, too.” My response was brief: “And hope, and love?”

Faith. It takes many forms.

The middle school students I saw this week on morning bus duty had faith, faith that made the last school bus step not a step only but a platform from which to leap into the new day.

In a classroom game of “form words using index cards with random base words and affixes,” I watched as members of both the boy and girl teams, full of faith that the last minutes of playing time would determine their personal success, jumped up and down excitedly while awaiting their turn to add a word to the list.

Not to be outdone by my students, I, too, have faith. On my school-wide announcement about a special activity for a group of select students, I wrote, “Prize options will include an outdated Napoleon Dynamite calendar, and piece of Styrofoam, and much more,” in faith that eccentricity will beat out practicality any twelve-year-old’s day.

And it did. The colleague who assisted with the activity, when I initially told her about the prizes, seemed unimpressed by my selection of trinkets and otherwise useless objects. “I’ll bring some prizes, too,” she said, and she did–really good candy bars, one of which I pilfered to give to my dear wife.

In the introduction to the activity–the students were to map out a road trip and could earn points for each city, state, national park, etc.–I told the contestants about the prizes.

“First, we have these candy bars,” I said. I could just sense the students’ ears perking up.

Then, holding up the objects, I said, “And we also have an outdated Napoleon Dynamite calendar, a piece of Styrofoam–” but was interrupted by at least two students calling out, “Oooh, I want that!” My colleague was floored.

At the end of the contest, the winners who chose candy seemed pleased, but not as excited as the boy who chose the Napoleon Dynamite calendar (“I’m going to give it to my dad,” he said), or the girl who chose the Styrofoam (“Yes!”), or even the boy who picked out a rock with some fossil impressions in it.

“What am I going to do with a rock?” he asked.