My day job has always required patience and determination because I have been teaching in inner city schools for nearly 20 years. Some of the children I have taught have been particularly challenging and have tested that patience to the limit, but I’ve always fought hard to keep them in school and learning. From time to time that patience is rewarded in unexpected ways.
I was shopping in the local supermarket a few days ago and was stood comparing prices when a lovely, self confident young woman spoke to me. “You don’t recognise me do you?” I had to confess I didn’t. She gave me her name and my eyes widened with surprise and delight. This particular young woman had been a very challenging eleven year old, running out of school, shouting abuse, fighting and stealing. Her hair permanently crawled with lice and we once had to hide a child from her to prevent them comimg to harm. At the end of the year we had to collect her from home and give her one to one support to get her through her SATs tests, but she passed because my team and I refused to give up on her. She was excluded from her next school before she had completed two years. Her future did not look bright. But here she was, a confident, independent adult, doing college courses and beginning to make something of her life. She could have chosen not to speak to me, but I am glad she did, she clearly wanted to show how she had changed. I felt so proud of her that I smiled all the way around the supermarket and forgot half the shopping!
My partner says that I work so well with challenging children because I’m such a strong character myself. My present program is taking all of that strength and patience at the moment. I’ve given up my fun boxfit class because it was having an impact on training and am no longer skipping, so it is very repetitious and different to anything I have ever done. Progress is slow and there are good and bad days but I can feel a difference in my core and am beginnning to sustain that activation. With trainer permission I tried going down into that one leg pistol position yesterday. On my right side I could feel the improved strength, controlling the move all the way down and not falling back at the bottom. My left is not so strong and I couldn’t maintain the tension at the bottom, so I’m really concentrating on that glute tension now. This has given me the confidence to keep going, even when the instructor of the crossfit class I used to go to keeps posting about the fun they are having. That can wait.
