Choose Your Own Adventure

We all have choices to make. All. As parents, students, friends, mothers and sons and daughters, husbands, wives and teachers. What does that mean, really? Choice. It means I am not responsible for the actions of others but I am responsible for my actions. I have a choice. What do I choose? The South. Happiness. Motherhood. Running. Teaching. Skittles and Coke and Chocolate. I make tons of choices. Guess what though, I choose teaching every day. It's not a profession for the faint of heart. There are teachers that take the shine off of it. Those type of people are in all professions. I choose to teach. Others may have arrived at it by happenstance but I choose to teach. Here's why: because eighteen little people choose me back. Every. Day. Those eighteen people didn't start out with a choice of what teacher they would have but they did have the choice to trust me or not and they choose to let me in and let me lead and by God, they will never regret that choice. Sometimes we forget that children have a choice to make a wall around themselves or to come with hearts wide open because they. always. come. with. hearts. wide. open. I am stearn and demanding of excellence but I will never take the choice to hope away from a child. Hope is why they can make a choice to come hearts wide open every day. I respect children. It's not as strange as it sounds, really, if you know the secret world of education. Teachers cry over students, obsess over them, worry and pray for them and love them because we see something parents and test makers and politicians don't see. Kids who choose to face another day with hope even when mom is in jail. When they were yelled at all morning before school. When parents divorce. When dogs die. When innocence is stolen. When they move six times in a year. When they have no friends. When they are hungry. dissappointed. devalued. sick. alone. sad. They still choose to hope that the teacher lady will find worth in them even when no one else seems to care. I choose more than teaching them to write and read and walk in the hall.

I choose to teach them that they are worth something to someone. I choose to be that teacher lady. The one who sees the strength they possess merely by having those wide open hearts. I choose to be the queen of those hearts. See you on Friday.