Ellen Franz is a teacher at an elementary school in the Sausalito Marin City School District, a small district just north of San Francisco. When she wrote this poem, she was teaching primary grades in a midsized urban school district and had been in education for 17 years. She is a poet who achieves, through her poetry, the kind of understanding that reaches from deep inside a teacher to deep inside a student. Her poem shows how reflections on teaching and learning can include more than studies of curriculum, assessment, and standards.