The Desert Changed My Life. It Can Change Yours, Too.
The Desert Changed My Life. It Can Change Yours, Too.
For decades, my life was defined by the people I met. My early days in the Air Force were spent in a small, close-knit community, not only within Washington, D.C., but the entire Washington metro area. After my first year of teaching in a rural South Carolina high school, I found myself among students, teachers, parents, and staff who all lived a similar life and shared a similar lifestyle. No one was any more to me than the other. One of my favorite teachers was the one who allowed me to join a “student-run radio station,” a part of his job which allowed him to make me feel like he loved me. I loved him so much that I worked as hard as I could to become the very best teacher he could ever have given me. It was an experience I would later pass onto the students.
As I began my tenure as a classroom teacher in a large Texas district, the same routine did not happen. For years I would meet students whose life did not mesh with mine. In classes, I would see an overachiever whom I felt I didn’t measure up to. Later, as I worked at the high school level, I would see another kid who needed a boost. One day I started to feel like I had been handed a bunch of random objects from a set of random objects. I felt out of place. Out of my element. Out of my league. I had no idea how to connect with the students, or how to interact with them as they began to recognize the similarities and differences between the students. I felt out of place.
My life was defined by the people I met. My early days in the Air Force were spent in a small, close-knit community, not only within Washington, D.C., but the entire Washington metro area.
A few years after that, my life was in a new city. I worked at a very small school, and soon I began to notice changes in the students and colleagues. I realized that many of the behaviors I was used