Acceptance

I had a friend in college who was really accepting and she said she got it from her mother. This friend of mine expressed "acceptance" in a way I had never seen before. When she hears a new piece of information, she really hears it. She doesn't reject it or ignore it. It's hard to explain. She's accepting in a way that leads me to believe that I bet she learns really quickly. She's so open to new things that it allows her to move on to the next thing where others might be stuck.

I find it really inspiring. We've all been in situations where we hold ourselves up by trying not to acknowledge the truth. And as cheesy as it sounds, the more I am able to see and recognize truth, the more successful I will be in Boston Public school district. My instructors give examples of things I never would have thought of. A student may be acting strange because they can only see in one eye, or because they got lupus and missed all of middle school. Tonight Dr. G said that many students come into high school without ever graduating middle school. She talked about how she once had a class half made up of students who could only speak Spanish and had never been in a classroom before and half made up of students who were trying to test into honor's courses for the next year--in English. I was just in awe. I think she said that she even had a para-professional special ed specialist who also couldn't speak English. She emphasized the need to just work with what you have. She made the analogy of how she as an administrator has to work with what she has as a staff, we are imperfect too. This Fall my cohort and I may be surprised by all kinds of crazy situations that seem impossible to effectively teach in. And I guess we just have to accept it. Because the sooner we accept it, the sooner we're going to be able to move forward and do something about it.