Tag: #inspiration

I am a teacher.

I am a teacher.

I greet teenagers each morning with sleep in their eyes.

With hope, encouraging words and accomplishments, their faces rise.

I listen to questions, concerns and thoughts that cross each mind.

They look ahead, forward, onward and upward to seek and to find.

Watching the adults carefully for moments to ask their whys,

I answer questions after showing compassion and not with sighs.

They seek to find the answers that seem to fit,

Their hopes, dreams, and aspirations that never quit.

I hear and see their perseverance through all their tries,

As they look for acceptance which never dies.

I am a teacher.

I am inspired by my daughter. – She walks across the graduation stage today.

I awoke this morning after sleeping in a hotel bed…after a flight down the east coast…after a 3 hour delay and sitting in the New England airport for five and a half hours…after rushing around at work to ensure my grade 8 team and my students were supported because of my absence today…thinking I’d wake up exhausted. Instead, I lie here in bed, after eating breakfast delivered by my adoring husband and magnificent step-father, with the covers up to my waist, with butterflies of excitement wrestling with the digestive juices in my belly.

My baby is walking across the graduation stage of the University of Central Florida in just a few short hours! Just that thought brings tears to my eyes and a lump in my throat. My heart is pounding with love, admiration and pride of this beautiful young woman!

I want to lose myself in this day, focus on her, her wisdom, all I’ve learned from her throughout her life and especially through these last years as she fought the prejudism inflicted upon her from her senior year of high school. People gave unsolicited advice at such a vulnerable time in her life, leaving her second guessing all the plans she had made. She persevered throught it all with strength and grace. She forged her own path, as I delighted in watching her take step after step into womanhood. She is an amazing young lady!

She is going to help heal the world! Before she does that though, I have today. I have her, my beautiful daughter, the part of me I love so much I can’t even put the feeling into words, my life-long friend, my inspiration to be the best person I can be.

Perhaps I’ll grow up to be like her one day!

I am inspired by my daughter.

I am inspired by a parent.

I am inspired by a parent. As a teacher of elementary and middle school students for 30 years, I have seen the drastic decline in parent support of teachers. Teachers seem to be under a warped magnifying glass by the general public. What does this magnifying glass see? The truth? Or the distorted sense of the word?

This skewed view is seen on the television news and in newspapers, depicting teachers as lazy, over-paid bon-bon eating babysitters that hang out in the teachers’ lounges with summers off to frolick without a care in the world. Most recently this lens is depicted via a town community page of ‘concerned parents’ which is full of misinformed people shouting out their disgust at the schools and the teachers they entrust their very own children to for seven hours each day – longer than many of them spend with their own children on a daily basis. I’m not interested in defending my profession, nor am I an advocate of watching the “news” chosen to be reported on the popular networks, or reading gossip columns that trash talk under the guise of being concerned, but I am interested in sharing how I am inspired by one parent.

One parent, on this day, this 5352nd school day working with a group of the overall 6000+ students that I’ve worked with over the years, stood out in a way that I haven’t seen in a long time. This parent’s voice would have echoed the voices of hundreds of parents years ago, but not today. Today this parent stood strong, stood behind a teacher, stood up for a teacher, supported that teacher’s work, prior work and faith in her future work. This parent voiced her belief in the dedicated intention of this teacher, of her past work with one of her own children and the confidence that all of the positivity seen over and over again portrayed by this teacher occurs each day and will continue. She stood up, as an advocate for a teacher, at a time when teachers seem to have such small voices in our communities today. 


Those few words held so much power and remind me of how a small effort of one parent can show teachers that they are supported. Although teachers may often feel defeated in this age of testing scores and staff cuts, I smile at the thought that this magnifying glass was polished.  A clear picture of what is truly happening in schools by this teacher and thousands just like her – daily focused time and effort, supporting and teaching each and every student with enthusiasm and dedication. What a gift was given today!  

I am inspired by a parent.

I am searching for Freedom.

I am wondering where Freedom lies and how to entice it to become my daily companion. Is Freedom your soulmate? How did you meet? Did you pursue it or did it court you? Who fell in love first?

What is the music that allows you to dance together, each beautiful step an ongoing performance of joy, as you live each day, you and Freedom? I long for this partner, I eagerly search for its music, tilting my head in this direction and that as I walk through each day. Where is my Freedom? My soulmate? What music can I play, sing, write to entrance my life partner out of hiding? I long for my Freedom, my partner, the one who I wake up to each morning with heartfelt love and put to rest each night as my body replenishes itself for a another invigorating day together. 

 I love Freedom!  I can yell it from the mountain tops, yodelling with the best of the those who have Freedom by their side. I fantasize about Freedom …I dream about Freedom….Freedom is so exhilerating, so dreamlike, so all encompassing! What is is about Freedom that the just hearing the word inside my head as I type makes my mouth salivate as my lips curl into a slight smile? Freedom feels sooooo good, just thinking about it. 

Freedom, where for art thou? Are you near? I can feel you; sometimes you feel like my partner, my lover, my one and only. Then you are gone, like a mysterious twinkle that blends into the darkened sky. Or are you really so close that I can smell, taste and hear you, but Knowledge quickly consumes you as my days fill up my mind? 

Knowledge, what a troublesome fellow he is. He is constantly by my side, holding on so tightly that at times I can hardly breathe. There’s a reason why Knowledge and Nuisance begin with the same sound – they are kissing cousins. I need you to step aside, Knowledge, allow some room for Freedom to spend time with me, to show me the world, to allow me to feel the world.

I know. I know. I know. But I want to feel. I want to feel Freedom.

I am inspired by my student.

I am inspired by my student.

Last week one of my students was having difficulty with an academic task. He was working through the stress of the work and his self-confidence in his ability to complete it in the time allotted. As this student’s stress was escalating, becoming apparent to students surrounding him, an angel reached his wing out to comfort the student.

This angel was another student sitting at the same table. In the most gentle, soothing voice and without looking up, he touched the anxious student. With his hand on the boy’s shoulder, he softly spoke to him saying, “You’ve got this. You are the most determined person I know. You can do it. You’ve got this.”

“You’ve got this.” From one adolescent to another, from an eighth grade classroom of angst, anxiety, fear of being different and bullied. From the heart of one student who, like all the others, experiences the ups and downs of this difficult age where minute to minute can be a struggle between independence and dependence, invincibility and vulnerability, triumph and disappointment. An act of solace from one young man who stopped his work to help another in pain. That call to reach out to a peer was deeper than the academic work at hand; it was a powerful yearning to connect, to alleviate the pain in another, to encourage, to motivate, to support.

This angel gracefully removed his wingtips from his peer’s shoulder and silently resumed his own work. The touch of those fingertips was felt on the shoulder, and his words felt in the troubled student’s heart. Anxiety abated, he too silently resumed his task at hand. “You’ve got this” echoed on as I watched them work.

I am inspired by my student.