COURAGE

These kids inspire me every day. Yesterday we started a new book study as an entire school. It's called Success for Teens. And given the number of fights, drugs, and just general hood behavior on campus, I love that someone in administration finally stepped up to the plate and implemented a school-wide study like this. Hopefully we'll see some positive results.

So yesterday morning, we started on chapter one. The chapter was about making positive choices and having goals. At the end of the chapter, it asked the students to make lists of things they were good at and things they loved to do. Then it asked them to answer this question: If you could do absolutely anything, and it wasn't too far-fetched, and it wasn't impossible, what would it be? Then it asked them to write the footprint they wanted to leave on the world.


After a particularly long and grueling week (the first week teaching Shakespeare is always akin to taking a sharp stick in the eye for all of us), I came in this morning, and before sitting down to read all my emails or just generally ready things for the day, I decided to look at their responses from yesterday. And it gave me strength for today.

One particularly quiet and very intuitive girl wrote this. It stopped me in my tracks.

This one kind of hit me in the gut. Some things never change. I'm sooo going to encourage her to learn how to let go of her inhibition NOW, because it only gets harder as the years go by. And she's an incredible writer and doesn't even know it. Gonna have to spend some extra QT with this one.

Then I saw this. What kind of footprint do you want to leave on the world?

She will. And I'm gonna help her.