Something happened today which kind of shook me. A student is having some internal conflict problems and it is spilling into school. I don't want to go into it all here. Needless to say, I originally wrote this long post about going back in time and yelling at teenage me because I see a lot of what this kid is going through in what I went through 20 years ago (damn I am getting old). It was very cathartic. I was emotional writing it, shaking and almost to tears. But when I got to the end I was fired up. I remembered the speech I gave at my high school graduation, something that has stuck with me ever since. It is a poem written by Charles Osgood in 1986 and I think what he says is truer than ever. I hope it means as much to you as it has to me. The following is the only part of my original post that I felt was worth keeping.
We have a real problem with mediocrity in this country. Too many people are perfectly fine living simple lives where they have no problem never meeting their full potential. Pretty Good Isn't Good Enough.
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I completely agree . . . we have gotten to the point of accepting average and not pushing the students or ourselves as teachers. Thanks for the video.
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