Resilience

Done. Pau. Finito. So many things have suddenly come to an end. First it was University of Hawaii. I walked up to the stage, got my Master's Degree, then scrambled home to finish off my edits for my Plan B paper and seal the deal on two years of busywork. There were points during the year when I thought the workload would be impossible to finish, but I got it done.

Next it was Teach For America. I compiled my last set of data, discussed it with my Program Director, reflected on the year, and then walked out of that Starbuck a new man, free of TAL Rubrics, Round One Observations, Professional Saturdays, End of Year Conversations, and all the other things that Teach For America has blessed me with over the last two and a half years.

Finally, it was my second year of teaching. The bell rang, the students left, and I scrambled to finish some last minute IEPs that had been thrown my way. This year, I felt more like a professional. It was all business. The kids were gone, the year was done, but I was already rushing to secure what I needed to make next year better. No time to stop and look back.

It's crazy what these two years have done to me. When I left home in June of 2008 for Hawaii and then Houston, it was a blur of confusion and emotion. With everything that had been going on back home, I already felt worn out and overwhelmed before Institute even began. I honestly didn't know if I'd have the energy or mental toughness to make it. But I did. In fact, I thrived, and I taught myself a very important lesson: Don't sell yourself short.

But then I got to Hawaii, set everything up in my sweltering portable, and tried to conjure up the same formula that had brought me success at Houston. I thought I would own it. But right off the bat, I hit a wall. Hard. This wasn't even close to Houston. This was Special Education. The first time I tried to run an actual lesson and realized that nobody was listening to a word I was saying. The day Trent started swearing at me and hitting his head against a table just because I asked him to take out a piece of paper. The moment I sat down with my UH mentor to look at all the upcoming IEPs I had to coordinate, only to hear her say to herself, "Oh, this is not good." The way the students just kept coming, and I was soon running a class about the size of a General Education class with students who were simply too difficult to manage all at once. All of it kept adding up and I was doing all that I could just to stay on my feet.

I'm not lying when I say that a lot of people in my shoes would have quit. And I almost did. I remember driving home one day early on, talking on the phone with my mom about how it was simply impossible to run a class of 18 kids with ADHD and other disabilities. But deep down, despite all the early blows I had taken, I still had just enough resilience to get by.

I'm not going to give myself a whole lot of credit for making it through two years of teaching Special Education with no prior experience. That's not to say that I'm very proud of how far I've taken my kids. But I've had a lot of help along the way. Resilience is what pushed me through, and it's the resilience that I witnessed over the course of my life from the people around me that lit a fire for me.

It was resilience from my mom. Two years of teaching has me pretty drained. Try over 30. Thirty something years of teaching, all while being the best teacher at her school. All of this while raising three children- three boys- very, very well.No one will ever doubt my dad's resilience. In the late fall of 2001, when he was diagnosed with leukemia, I thought that was it. But in less than a year, he was in remission and training for triathalons. To beat a disease like that is one thing, but to anihilate it and then get into better shape than ever before is a whole new level. In two weeks, he'll be in Maui competing in the King's Trail Triathalon. If I ever come across any sort of struggle at school, all I have to do is consider that and my problems become pretty much irrelevant. And then there's the resilience of my older brother Pete, who two years ago caught a freak illness that he barely survived. I remember visiting him at the hospital for the first time and he had snuck some law review articles into the cover of an SI Swimsuit Issue to study. I told him it was sacreligious, but I knew that he was just that motivated. When they had to put him out for a few weeks and things just got worse and worse, a part of me deep down knew that he would pull through, because he was who he was, and we were who we were. And less than a year later, I'm at Seattle U's law school graduation and he's being commended as the top graduating student of his class. That's something.
Finally, I owe so much to the resilience of the most important people through this two year endeavor: my students. I hate struggling, and I hate losing. Imagine being down by three goals with the time winding down and nothing going for you. Defeat brings out the worst in us. So many of my students must feel like this every day in the classroom, because there's so much stacked against them. But they've shown me more fight and perseverance than I ever knew existed. We've had our ups and downs, that's for sure, but over these two years, I can say that they've taught me far more than I could ever teach them.
Someday I hope that I can provide that spark of reslience for others the way these people have instilled it in me. I owe them so much.

But in the meantime, I'm off to Kauai for the week to backpack the Na Pali coast. This is the type of stuff I live for. Many good times to come. Adventure awaits...