Don't confront me with my failures

"Don't confront me with my failures.
I had not forgotten them."
"These Days" lyrics, Jackson Browne

I've decided that my classroom this year is going to have a concrete, yet conceptual, theme. Call out the gold.

No one needs reminding of their baggage. She is very aware of it, at least in weight. Why do we believe that reminding someone, in words, eye-rolls and calls home, the bad will stop? I admit that it's much easier (for me, at least), to see others' junk, their shortcomings, their shortfalls. Just as it's easier to see my own.

But this will not be a year of easy. I'm leaving my baby with a capable and delightful in-home daycare provider, but she's not me. If he doesn't get me so I can be impactful at school with hundreds of high schoolers, these kids aren't just going to walk away with figures of speech, in theory. We're gonna choose the difficult, the digging. For gold.

We're going to learn to call out the gold in each other this year. Now, it takes different tools than planners and pencils. It will take new perspectives through once fogged up lenses used to criticism and comparisom. We will need a new set of feedback that reminds our minds of dreams and destinies.

My students, I declare, will walk out of there with their own dare: give hope. Dig until you find a person's gold, and call it out. And do the same for yourself.

It's going to be a golden year. And my Golden Graham Holden will hear about it, one day, when I tell him what I did when he was in daycare. I'll say, instead of confronting my students and colleagues with their failures, I refocused my gaze to their beauty, and reminded them of it, daily.