Several readers have been asking for additional posts that feature excerpts from the upcoming memoir.

If you are one of those people, then I promise you are really going to enjoy this segment. The story is one of my favorites from when I worked in Plant City with Middle-School students.

I’m not about to spoil the ending, but I can promise it is worth the six minutes of listening to get there!

The timestamp is Plant City circa Spring 2000. The place is Turkey Creek Middle School. The story is classic behavior management. The names are “changed to protect the guilty.”

The joy when a teacher breaks through!

Oh, but the joy! The joy of taking a risk and seeing it pan out in terms of a student making progress. The crazy fact that the best path forward in that moment would never have been approved by anyone up the chain of administration. The dynamics of working with highly disruptive, creative and impossible to predict students – reason always turned on its head. The beauty of a hard-earned moment of connection when to all appearances the prospects are dismal at best.

So there you have it. The exact reason teaching is both so wonderfully rewarding and so harrowing all in the same moment.

I managed to enjoy almost twenty years in the classroom, working with Autistic, Severely Emotionally Disturbed and Emotionally Handicapped students, from three years old all the way to fifteen. And it has likely given me more than enough material for any number of books. Drama; comedy; adventure; tragedy; autobiography; non-fiction; horror. All this and more!

But this story about my student “Frankie” – while in many ways just the tip of a really huge iceberg – is absolutely a keeper.

I remain grateful to have these amazing experiences to draw from – DEREK