Great Success!

Last was not so good for me. Student teaching is exhausting, and when you are exhausted and faced with added stress things do not always go so well. I went into this week wondering what what kinds of problems and letdowns would be awaiting me, and what I found is that one success, can change your entire outlook on things. Teaching has been going well this week, things are clicking rather well and I have really been enjoying it. So I count that as a success. Another huge success came last night. I was at work at the coffee shop and it was slow so I was doing some work (of course while simultaneously checking facebook) and I saw a bunch of my friends had statuses about the PRAXIS. My heart sank and stomach turned and I knew that this would be the straw that broke my back. I thought for sure I had failed and this would set me into some sort of anxiety overload and I would wake up a week from now in a straight jacket in Phil Haven... Well as you can see, being that I am typing this, I am not in a straight jacket. I passed with a score that was well over the minimum requirement and frankly way higher than I would have ever imagined. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Recently, I was turned onto an awesome blog by my friend Josh, one of the great minds in my life, about learning and thinking called brainpickings.org. They have all kinds of books and quotes and just cool stuff. One of the posts was about a book of correspondences between Jackson Pollock and his family. There are a lot of beautifully written letters, but one from his Dad stood out to me. He wrote:

"Well Jack I was glad to learn how you felt about your summer’s work & your coming school year. The secret of success is concentrating interest in life, interest in sports and good times, interest in your studies, interest in your fellow students, interest in the small things of nature, insects, birds, flowers, leaves, etc. In other words to be fully awake to everything about you & the more you learn the more you can appreciate & get a full measure of joy & happiness out of life.”

I love that, "the secret to success is concentrating interest in life... in other words to be fully awake to everything about you."
When I think back to last week, and the "dark period" I was in. I realized I that none of that darkness came from the classroom, but rather outside bull shit. When you focus on you, your goals and identity, you can't get knocked down, and thats success.