Results: Walk A Mile In Their Shoes

One Toronto teacher made sure her students started the summer off on the right foot, literally. This teacher gifted each member of her grade 2/3 class with a brand new pair of the trendiest runners for summer. The teacher, who posts on social media as @teachinthe6ix, wanted to surprise her students with a very special end-of-term present for working hard all year. With some crowd funding, she was able to raise money to buy all 22 students in her class this special end-of-year gift. Have you ever heard of a teacher doing anything this extravagant?

But the gift goes a lot deeper than just a new pair of shoes. In an Instagram post showing the big reveal, she explains it all started with an in-class viewing of Like Mike, the 2002 flick in which Bow Wow gets some basketball super powers and a one-day contract with his local NBA team thanks to a pair of thrift store sneakers formerly owned by Michael Jordan. One line in particular from the movie really stuck with her students: "It's not about the shoes, instead it's who wears the shoes, that make them special." "Seeing their love for the film and observing their abundance of creativity, I choose an activity that combined both elements." And so, the sneaker workshop came to be. After teaming up with a local sneaker studio to supply the markers and paints needed to individualize each pair, Stephanie's students could be seen eagerly customizing their new kicks in the video with designs ranging from solar systems to rainbow prints and everything in between. Do you like this idea?

In the last few years, she felt the relationship between home and school was lacking. That was especially true for the students in her class who are refugees, including those from Ukraine, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. "After we came back to school back in March, a lot of them had arrived and they were just fresh here in Canada. Some of them spoke English, some of them not so much. So I try and do community activities where it gets everybody as a family involved." Do you admire a teacher who knows that the school--home relationship is very important for creating a positive learning experience?