Find The Hero

Taneicea is reciting a poem she made in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Look at her face; filled with hope and happiness, believing in the promise that a today filled with great belief and great actions creates an even greater tomorrow........the same as MLK.

I'll ask her to write it down for me today. I liked it very much.

I wrote a poem for her the first day I met her. It was stolen from the back of my motorcycle before I could publish it but the first few lines were something like:

Please sir, I hope you're not lying. Could someone believe in me this much, Without me even trying?

I want to believe in me so much....as much as....as much as you seem to believe in me.

I was reading Shakespeare's sonnets the other day and found a perfect one for her to replace mine. It's slightly better :-)

It talks about going through rough times (Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May) and the good times seeming far too short ( And summer's lease hath all too short a date).

And it also speaks the truth of the power of an eternal internal summer, so long as that sunshine is kept alive inside ( But thy eternal summer shall not fade).

Sonnet XVIII

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Love and beauty is not about what someone else sees in you and what they can take or get from you, it's about seeing it in yourself and others, and the process of igniting it and fanning the flames until there's a wildfire inside, even if it takes dancing to Sinatra while still teaching (helping new student Courtney understand multidigit decimal multiplication).

Since her arrival she has yet to leave class one day not knowing something she didn't know when she arrived.

In spite of the singing, dancing and sonnets, there are no wasted days in this class, because there are no people who are a waste of time.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Shakespeare were both courageous persons who felt and thought deeply.

Taneicea, who has grown @two years in reading this year in just five months, and actually asked for these pictures to be taken, has found her courage and ability to think and feel deeply.

She is my hero. At the Foo Fighters concert last week during the song "There Goes My Hero", I began to see the faces of my students, past and present. I realized I liked the song so much because not only are people like Sinatra, Shakespeare and MLK my heroes, but so are my children and students.

It's so easy to see the hero inside of each one of them. And all I have to do is hold onto that vision until it becomes a reality.......TO THEM!

Find the hero inside of others....And you'll find it inside of yourself!