The annual Knights of the Round Table ceremony will be held on Feb. 20 in the big gym at FHN. This ceremony is put on to celebrate and recognize the students nominated by anonymous teachers for various reasons, and the students finally get to see the face of their nominator.

English teacher and Knights of Excellence co-sponsor Lindsey Scheller coordinates the event, asking for nominations, sending out the invitations, making the program and announcing why the student was nominated.

“A lot of time goes into just trying to organize everything, and get the invitations out to kids and then collect RSVP’s, so that I can let teachers know,” Scheller said. “We have to print the programs and my own personal responsibility is to know how to pronounce all the kids’ names, and I have to read through the program a bunch of times to make sure I’m not going to say anything stupid.”

The honor of being nominated as a Knight of the Round Table is like no other, as there is no specific qualification or standard that the student aim towards.

“One of the things that I think is the neatest thing about the award is that everybody gets it for a different reason,” Scheller said. “And there’s nothing that a kid can do to try to get the award…they can have absolutely no idea, they just get noticed by somebody for being awesome.”

The names on the list of nominees will represent several different types of students, regardless of the letter grades they receive in class.

“It’s not always the most academically best student,” senior Hannah DeGraw said. “There are kids who are recognized who…might not be the best in school, but they do have a strong moral character, or they have other aspects that don’t typically get recognized on a system where it’s judged by grades or athletic achievement.”

DeGraw was nominated as a Knight of the Round Table this year, and looks forward to finding out who the teacher is that recognized her on a different level than most.

“The teacher that I think nominated me probably knows me on a personal level,”  DeGraw said. “She knows me in a different way than others and sees how hard I actually do work.”

The award ceremony lifts up FHN students to appreciate the great qualities that they bring to the table, in contrast to highlighting areas where the students went wrong.

“I feel like any time you are recognizing somebody for doing good things it’s going to benefit North as a whole,” Scheller said. “I think there’s a lot of things you can do and then you can get negatively recognized, but it’s kind of hard to get positively recognized, especially if you are not some straight A student…I think that does a lot for kids to just realize ‘Holy cow, what I’m doing, just being myself, got me noticed.’”