Partnership Educators,
Every week Andy goes for a Sunday stroll down the street in his Nashville neighborhood. About a mile and a half down the road he meets Gabe and they clap, snap, and high-five each other as they pass. This ritual has been occurring for several years since they met in early 2000. Gabe and Andy are good friends and they started this goofiness in order to consistently see one another each week. "Picking up the phone is great, but I've got a friend who literally will walk through rain and the snow just to give me a high five," Andy says. "And I wish everybody could feel that feeling."
Andy has been keeping a journal of their weekly high five encounters for some time and number 312 stands above all others. That's because Gabe was hospitalized with a severe form of encephalitis. It caused his brain to swell and robbed him of his past. You read that correctly, Gabe could not remember who he was. "I pretty much forgot my life," he said.
Encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain tissue, is rare, affecting about one in 200,000 people each year in the U.S. When it strikes, it can be very serious, causing personality changes, seizures, weakness, and other symptoms depending on the part of the brain affected. For Gage, it meant that friends became strangers.
That's when his friend Andy, now a virtual stranger, came to visit. When you stare into the eyes of a long-time friend and see a pleasant stare of non-recognition, it can be unnerving or disorienting. Andy was unphased and required something of his friend. "I said, 'Well, Gabe, this is going to sound really weird but I need you to do something for me. Give me a high five.' And he was like, 'Ok'"
Gabe Scott curiously watched as this stranger approached his bedside for the high-five event. He describes it like this. "When the moment happened my body just did what it has been doing for years - clap, snap, high five," reported Gabe.
That was in September. Since then, a lot of Gabe's memories have returned, but few more cherished than this silly tradition, which doesn't seem quite so silly anymore. "It's really special to have a memory of something - to have something that is this consistent in my life that means this much," Gabe said.
Hope is the belief that your future can be brighter and better than your past and that you actually have a role to play in making it better. We first have to see a pathway to it getting better and have the will to make it better in order for hope to be realized. As we learned recently building hope in others is a planned action on our part. Andy took an action to help build a pathway for his friend to have the hope of getting better.
Little actions make big differences in the lives of those we are in charge of. How do we continue to build hope, develop empathy, perseverance, and other portrait competencies through a clear pathway and will? Thanks for your continued efforts in dipping your toes into the implementation of strategies with kids around our competencies and for working in the reality that these competencies are equally as important as any academic skill we give them. We know that things we do will not work. We will have failures with strategies. Samuel Beckett, an Irish writer said, "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Vaccinations:
There are no other educationally focused vaccine clinics planned within the near future. If you submitted a request to be vaccinated and didn't receive a clinic date or if you have now decided to get vaccinated please go to the following Shasta Ready COVID Vaccination;
here: https://www.co.shasta.ca.us/ready/covid-19/vaccinations This page also contains the second shot dates and times for those of you who have already received the first dose.
Have a fantastic weekend and thanks,
Rob