In this article, the author relates her difficult experiences as a novice teacher when she started teaching bilingual third-graders in Spanish at Spangler Elementary School in 2002. She relates that her teaching strategy of balancing rigor and sweetness had its rewards as her students' rate of reading proficiency on the Colorado Student Assessment Program was 60 percent--a stark contrast compared to the prior year's proficiency rate of 7 percent. She relates that she used five principles for teaching her students and these are: (1) Conveying a sense of urgency; (2) Developing personal bonds; (3) Fostering a joy for learning; (4) Raising the bar with high expectations; and (5) Cultivating social and emotional intelligence. (Contains 1 footnote.)