Weekly Wide-Awake: Try and Be Terrific

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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Weekly Wide-Awake: Try and Be Terrific

There are so many people who’ve come before us, arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo. Look out at the meadow, you can almost see them, generations dissolved in the bluegrass and hay. I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.
Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

I want to try and be terrific, even for an hour, too. What does it mean to be terrific? Will I know it if and when it happens? Is terrific possible for me, given that I have been far from terrific an awful lot in my life? Who gets to say what is terrific and what is not? Alongside arrows and wagon wheels and obsidian tools and generations, what constitutes terrific?

Maybe it helps to remember the times I have tried and been terrific, even for an hour. Maybe thinking in terms of hours — or even moments, not years or lifetimes — is the place to start the terrific conversation. Maybe deciding I get to claim terrific in my life — not any proxy for permission or power — helps, too.

It is hard for me to claim terrific in my life. I am not sure why it is easier for me to cling to moments when I fall short or fail, then to claim terrific. Perhaps terrific is too heavy to hold, or gets drowned out in the noise of the everyday. I am not sure why the negative has such resonance. I am not sure why the monkey mind is so powerful. It takes practice to see — the terrific and the not so terrific — and wrap my arms around it all. In seeing it all, I try to be terrific. I try to be terrific again and again and again.

Lately, I have felt far from terrific. I have been caught in yet another situation in which my tendency to own failure — to accept the weight of loss, boundaries, and truth, to be held accountable and to feel its consequences — has left me broken and questioning. All that being said, I am not given up on trying to be terrific.

Weekly Wide-Awake: Try and Be Terrific

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