PPBF: I'm Sorry You Got Mad

Today I'm grateful because our new book's got swag!

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U Is For Unconditional Love

Today we get to unleash the ultimate lesson: 

U is for unconditional love!

Chapter two is all about Unconditional Love, and Amy over at

The Resourceful Room 

is spot-on in her reflections and review. You will not want to miss her poignant post and freebie download. I am feeling so grateful to know teachers like Amy who are always searching for ways to empower their superheroes by nurturing their hearts while they stretch and grow their academic potential. 

Share this book with your little lovebugs as you help them

unleash their inner superhero.

Need more resources?

Click the graphic for a quick Q&A and to learn more

about this SUPER documentary.

Check out this article about Unconditional Love. 

Enjoy these quotes about the Power of Love. 

Sing along with the song Loves Makes The World Go Round.

Read Teaching Kids To Choose Love at All Done Monkey.

Here's to giving the hero in you a love-filled day.

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Turtlelicious!

Every time I get the opportunity to mediate a dispute or help solve a problem, I stress the importance of following up a wrong with a sincere apology. Authors Gary Chapman and Jennifer Thomas wrote a wonderful tool for helping with this called The Five Languages of Apology that we actually studied with our staff last year. We made a Give Me Five! so that we could handily recall the five Rs that the book talks us through, then we posted them as a reminder of the critical components of a genuine apology. When we're truly sorry for what we've done, we regret what happened, we take responsibility for it, there may be some restitution to make it right, we need to repent to the person we've wronged, and we request forgiveness. One forgiveness piece that I add for my students is to replace the glib response "It's okay" when they're receiving an apology with "I accept your apology and I forgive you."

In the book Franklin Forgives, the hard-headed big brother is far from willing to say "It's okay" much less "I forgive you" when his little sister loses his gold fish on a family outing. He worries that forgiving means forgetting and he finds out just how hard it is to accept an apology and forgive. He also discovers why it's ever-so-important for both the giver and the recipient of that forgiveness.


Speaking of turtles, here's a kid-friendly recipe for the pecan cluster TURTLES that I make with my kids.

Turtles

1 bag of caramels (I use Kraft but Brach's work, too)

About 96 large pecan halves (two for each caramel)

1 1/2 lb. melting chocolate or almond bark

A few slivers of Gulf canning wax (optional)

Aluminum Foil

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Lay two pecan halves side-by-side, flat-size down to make turtle clusters on a cookie sheet. Unwrap the caramels and place one on top of each pecan cluster. Place in warmed oven for 4 or 5 minutes to slightly soften the caramels.  While caramels are softening, put chocolate into bowl for melting, adding a few slivers of wax to thin it out a bit if desired. Melt chocolate on high in the microwave for one and a half minutes, stirring after the first minute so it doesn't burn. Dip the pecan clusters into the chocolate and let them dry on a piece of aluminum foil before enjoying these turtlelicious treats!  (Yield: 4 dozen)

 Try This Turtle Tutorial:

Wait, did I say that this is our favorite thing to eat? I meant share!  

Happy apologizing, forgiving, and sharing!

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Forgiveness On The Fifty

Yard line, that is. That's where this story takes place, but it's not where this story starts. 

Find a way back to 1986. No computers. No Internet. No cell phones. How much of what were you doing that year do you really remember? I’d just been hired to teach Spanish and do some coaching at Friendswood High School. It's my third job in three years so I really want it to work out! I’m coaching freshman volleyball before school, teaching six sections of Spanish during the day, and sponsoring the Speech and Debate team in the afternoons, so I’m pretty busy. But it’s going really, really well, even better than I had hoped. I've made some new friends, my VB team is winning, and I like my classes. In fact, it’d almost be perfect, except for that one student whom I’ll call D.

    
Everything I know about what doesn't work with kids, I learned from D. His behaviors challenged me; I found him really difficult disrespectful challenging rude obnoxious. I tried everything. I tried being nice to him, well, kind of, as best I knew how. I tried incentives. I tried wishing him out of my class. I tried getting him a schedule change. Nothing worked. I called my dad one night a few days weeks into the school year, and found myself complaining about D. When I told him in no uncertain terms that my classes would be perfect if not for D, my father told me that that even if D were to drop my class, there’d always be another D. He surmised that someone else would likely become my least favorite student and suggested that I find something to like about him. Again, I tried. His sister was on my freshman volleyball team and I like her – does that count? I liked his mom (a lot!) when I met her at Open House – is that good? Sadly, I never found a way to make peace with, to get along with, or even to remotely like that student. It was a long year for both of us.

If you’ve heard me speak, then you may already know what's about to happen. As I reflect on 25 years as an educator, I realize that if I could have one do-over, it would be to find a way to make it work with D.  It’d probably be as simple as simply being nicer to him.  If I’ve told this story once, I’ve told it a hundred times. The point?  Find a way to like your students, to make each one of them your favorite. Individualize. Differentiate. Make. It. Work. Because there are no do-overs, not in school, not in life.  So, to get back to the fifty-yard line in my story’s title, we have to flash forward twenty years.
  

Now that my daughter's in high school, I've returned to FHS as a Band Mom. It has been 15 years since I’ve even been to Mustang stadium, way back when I taught Spanish there, before I became a counselor. I was attending the Friday night football game during Kaitlyn's freshman year that just happened to be Homecoming. At halftime, we hear over the loud speaker that those of us who were working at FHS in 1988 are invited to meet the graduates who came home for the reunion on the fifty-yard line for a photo opp. My husband elbows me and encourages me to go down onto the field. I hesitate, because I can’t even remember who was in that class, but with prodding, I reluctantly head that way. I see a few friendly faces, students who actually live here as adults and whose children attend my school, but mostly I don’t recognize very many of these now thirty-eight-year-olds.
   

As I float from circle to circle, I do see a group of boys men that I know. One of them only looks vaguely familiar, and all I can come up with is Hector. Since I always called my students by their chosen Spanish name, that’s what I called him as I said hello to this very tall man. Hector? He laughed and said, “Dude, it’s me, D!”  There. He. Was. A million things went through my mind at warp speed. I'd said over and over again that I'd regretted how I treated D. I said I was going to apologize to him if I ever see him again, and, after all these years, this was my chance to make it right. So right there, on the fifty-yard line, before I could talk myself out of it, I extended my hand to shake his and heard myself say this: “Oh, D, I think I owe you an apology. I wasn’t very nice to you when you were in my class.” He interrupted. “Dude, it was my bad. I was a s**t back then.” “Be that as it may (wink, wink),” I continued. “I was your teacher and I should have found a way to make it work. Please forgive me.” 

I'm pretty sure I heard him whisper something about turning out okay, and we went our separate ways.   

As I reflect, it was awkwardly amazing to finally get the chance to apologize. I’d been regretting how I treated him for more than twenty years and it felt great to make amends. It was unbelievably liberating to be able to ask that student for forgiveness on the fifty; in a weird way, it may have even been better than that elusive do-over I knew I could never get.

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