I Have Returned

Greetings to the blogosphere.

My absence from my own website has not been due to intentional abandonment.  I took a hiatus to become situated in my new city and my new professional role.  While my career has spanned several years – both professional and volunteer – my current role has required much of my time.  Please don’t get me wrong, I am glad to be in a position that requires such diligence and time investment.  In fact, it is the role I’ve been working toward for about nine years.

Just like many of my students did previously, I let roadblocks, poor decisions and confusion interfere with achieving success and achieving my dream.  And just like many of my students, I learned to remove the negative things from my life, the confusion and roadbloacks, so that I could stand a chance at achieving my dream.  I have achieved it, and I honestly believe most of my students will achieve theirs.  Next Saturday, I will have the wonderful honor of watching several of them demonstrate achievement and success – putting their past mistakes behind them and moving ahead to become the leaders that they will definitely be.  I will see them graduate high school.

Just like these young men and women, I feel like I’ve defied the odds, too.  My students did not struggle financially like I did growing up.  We are actually quite opposite in that respect.  I never struggled with some of the issues they have faced as teens, though I do have a couple of things in common with these students.  I was adopted at a young age and dealt with a great deal of anger issues as a child and early teen.  Growing up, I also dealt with a great deal of self-esteem and insecurity issues – just as most teens did and always will.

Where the battle differs between my students and me is regarding money.  Upon graduation, I had no money for college.  My parents have struggled financially their entire lives just to survive, let alone pay for a college education.  Additionally, my grades were not excellent so I did not qualify for a scholarship to a state-run school or community college, let alone a more prestigious school.  Thanks to Pell Grants, the fact that my dad worked as a janitor at the community college, and that I worked at least twenty hours a week, I had enough financial aid and tuition reimbursement to squeak through community college.  Earning a bachelor’s degree was a little tougher.  Student loans did not cover all the expenses and so I wound up acquiring my first credit card to pay for housing and for studying abroad in England for a month during my final year.

The struggle did not end with receiving my college diploma.  Now I had my own financial whole but had my sights set on a master’s degree.  My grade point average was not enough to achieve acceptance to the universities in England I sought, nor was it enough to receive acceptance to the universities I sought two years later, after relocating to the east coast.  So, scholarships were out of the question.  Thankfully, three years later I managed to apply to the right universities, because I received acceptance letters from all three.  As a result, I moved to New York in 2008 and began a graduate school stint that I still cannot believe.  I went to a very expensive, prestigious school in Manhattan – teaching in NYC public schools during the day and taking classes at night.  The result was graduating with honors and a 4.0 grade point average – something I never achieved at any level – not even kindergarten.  My student loan balance doubled, but I still achieve my goal in the face of NUMEROUS financial obstacles that should have shut every door for me.

I share this story about my life, because it adds to part of the reason why it means so much for me to see my students achieve their goals.  These particular students have faced adversity – though much of it self-inflicted – and an outside force just would not let this adversity stop them from achieving.

Bottom line:  If the poor and sickly son of a somewhat-employed janitor can graduate at the top of his class in a master’s program from Fordham University within less than one year, then there is hope for most anyone.  It is this same wonderment I encourage in the lives of my students, and occasionally I see this wonderment expressed.

For this alone, my years of struggle at reaching my current professional role has been worth it!

Take care, Eric

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