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![Kindergarten teacher Melissa Pizzo's 2012 class brimmed over the state cap, at 20 students. [Times | 2012]](http://www.tampabay.com/storyimage/HI/20180118/ARTICLE/301189559/AR/0/AR-301189559.jpg&MaxW=600&imageVersion=Rotator)
This is Bonnie Bresnyan, disco dancing across the stage at Tampa’s Straz Center for the Performing Arts to the strains of “Let’s Groove” by Earth, Wind and Fire. She did so twice during Tuesday’s Teacher of the Year awards ceremony: First, when introduced by former student David Soto; and later, when she learned she had won. (She even got Superintendent Jeff Eakins to dance.)
Which brings us to the essays.
We see a lot of Teacher of the Year contest essays. Sometimes they include heartfelt statements about wanting to be the difference in a child's life. Sometimes they are loaded with jargon that only a fellow educator would understand, about credentials they have earned and trainings they have led.
Not Bresnyan's. Read her essay answers for herself. You can almost see her flying through the special education classroom at Lewis Elementary School like the "busy busy bee" she said she is.
Soto, by the way, could barely hold a pencil when he met Bresnyan. He is now a junior at the University of South Florida.
His career goal: To teach reading to children with learning disabilities.