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We Eat, We Sleep, We Take It One Day at a Time
She’ll be three in mid-June. We hope there’s a playground open on Planet Earth by then. We are lucky and grateful and tired and silly and when there’s an afternoon nap…we are wonderfully, mercifully quiet.
When so much is going wrong with the world and so much of life is suspended in the air, paused, uncertainty seems the only certainty. One. Day. At. A. Time.
I keep saying the words and they keep seeming important to me. We cannot control much these days. Accepting that is step one.
In 2015 and 2016, I taught high school humanities at a small charter school that was upside-down. I had to learn how to tread water in a new way. Behaviors that you would not expect in a learning environment, well, they were everywhere. The vast majority, maybe 85%, of the students were from poor families, many of whom spoke limited English. Some students had lost family members to violence. Some had babies. Some were pregnant. Attendance for about half of my students was spotty at best. I could not control any of those things. What I could control was my attitude, my reactions and my expectations. It was a brutal 18 months, but I learned a lot about myself and gained enormous respect for the students who were dedicated to making something of themselves despite the school environment and the domino effects of poverty…
