Entertaining God - Part 3

When the principal called I mentioned the true fighters that they were in class, being the 2nd and 3rd highest students with the most logged reading minutes. She wonderfully worked this into her talk with them and that they were obviously better than how they were behaving.
When they were allowed to come back to class I let them have it. I don't know where it came from, but I let them have "IT" completely - ALL my belief, ALL my confidence, and ALL my patience. I felt myself pumping out tons of energy as I shared as lovingly and calmly, yet fervently, that real strength is in controlling their tempers, that they were able to do it, and that I demanded it from them for at least this one year.

As I sat back to read them and see how effective this was, I started thinking how Life isn't always pretty or fair, sometimes even ugly and discouraging, but all I knew was that if the evils of life try to take a person from Heaven and into Hell, we should return the favor by taking one headed for certain Hell and into Heaven.

And if life tries to take a kid, I'm taking TWO from hell, giving them LIFE, unstoppable belief in themselves and unstoppable skills. You wait till they're adults before you try and crush them. Hopefully by that time they have become unstoppable or at least have a good enough network of friends and family that can pick them up when they're down and believe in them when they're doubting themselves.

Don't knock a kid down with a sledgehammer. Build them up to be able to be able to withstand the sledgehammers life will hit them with when they're adults (or wrenches if they play dodge ball - from the movie "Dodge Ball").

I start this building up with dry erase markers. I was going over the homework and some weren't paying attention. Respect is big with me, and I told them they were capable of paying attention now and not making me repeat myself later. I wanted to get my point across effectively, so I controlled my growing impatience and diminishing energy with the effectiveness of humor.

I said they better be wearing a bike helmet when they asked me the homework later because I was going to bounce a dry erase marker off their heads; which I did to Chad who volunteered to demonstrate this.

Their laughter pepped me up enough to notice that Miguel was not only reading, but reading a 300 page book. Now this is a kid who according to his parents has never read before, meaning Miguel has literally changed his life in just two weeks by changing his feelings, thoughts, and actions (reading books v. sitting around watching TV all the time).

Don't tell me.....DON'T TELL ME!...that life is mostly bad and unfair. You want more out of it? GIVE MORE TO IT! We just have to quit whining about the difficulties and start WANTING WITH A PASSION!

But how do we do this? ..............

....To Be Continued