Every day is special........

Last week we all were a part of something pretty special-pun intended.  While I preach using every moment to teach and to push our students higher and higher, there are moments when we have to pause and do something that is not academic. The Special Olympics sendoff parade was just that. All of us, no matter what age or attitude in life, want to feel proud. As I followed the parade around videoing the students in the parade and the students lined up cheering them on, a couple of things occurred to me. The first was the faces of the Special Olympians.  They were thrilled to have this pomp and circumstance albeit some of them were a little confused-and that makes sense due to their physical and cognitive “differentabilities”.  What I saw even more was the look on the faces of the Boyd Buddies.

These Boyd Buddies selected this Friday afternoon club. While most of their friends wanted to do mystery Club, juggling, cooking, puzzles, and a host of other clubs, these students decided they wanted to become friends and help out our students in our special education classes.  Their faces were that of true pride-not for themselves, but for their buddies. One of our male regular ed students –a 5^th grader- where this is normally an absolute social suicide move, held hands with his male buddy and kept encouraging him to keep going in the parade.  After the parade when they were safely on the bus, I did what I always do and went back to my office to download the video and post on our social media accounts.

While I was waiting for the video to load on Youtube, I kept watching it over and over. What I noticed this time were our students who were lining the hall. They were just as excited as the athletes. They were cheering them on and had the students’ names on banners. They are not afraid of our students or making fun of our students with special needs-and that has been intentional. We teach our students that your normal isn’t the only normal.

But more than anything, I realized that there is so much good in this world. We hear so much bad. We hear the mental illness rates rising, we here the persecution of our schools for not doing enough to help students, we hear about mass shootings, we hear about the rise of screen addiction. But do we ever stop to take pride in what we are doing right and so very well?

We have a huge responsibility in teaching our students to read, write, to calculate math, and to understand scientific facts, and to learn from historical events. But moreover we teach our students that there’s more than one way to be right. We teach them that every person is special. We teach them that it doesn’t matter a student’s color, size, clothes, shoes, or last name that makes them important, it is there heart.

Are we successful every day and at every moment-absolutely not. But do we keep trying?  I adored Barbara Bush. On a news report last week upon her death, someone quoted her as saying, “never lose sight of the fact that the most important yardstick of your success will be how you treat other people - your family, friends, and coworkers, and even strangers you meet along the way.” Take pride in the fact that we are doing just that as we teach this value every day to our students. And if you don't.......maybe today is just the right day to start.