This Week in Room 106: Resilience and Recovery

This week we’ve struggled a bit. After starting out on Monday with a plan, I became unexpectedly ill and missed two days, during which my plan got derailed and the continuity was interrupted for the students.  Apologies, certainly, but there’s a life lesson there for us all:  sometimes we have to drop back and punt. I’m still coughing and wheezing mightily, but I’m spending this morning amid piles of paper and plan on returning caught up on Monday. We’ll recover. Give me another day or so and all grades should be up to date.

I continue to be impressed with your children. Each class is a Duke’s mixture, of course:  students for whom everything seems easy alongside those who struggle to do each task, those to whom every issue seems to loom with great importance, and those who have difficulty getting motivated about any academic task.

After dealing with a couple of discipline issues that were disappointing early this week, I’ve observed indications of maturity and recovery that revealed a lot about who your young people are growing to be, and it has really encouraged me. Resilience is a quality that serves us all well, so I hope we are learning lessons that make us move on gracefully from moments of perceived failure, and those times when our life plans will inevitably be interrupted — such as by illness or other unexpected detours. 

I’d like to leave you with a piece of wisdom from my 87-year-old former educator father, who has watched a lot of young people through a lot of years of growing.

Nobody knows what a boy is worth,

and the world must wait and see;

for every man in an honored place,

is a boy that used to be.

~Phillips Brooks

God is not finished with them yet.