The Places You Will Go

Music By Danielle Rose

There is so much to tell you, but I can't. The video is my best attempt to describe how awesome it was to be in Haiti. The people are beautiful, the land is beautiful, and the trip was awesome.

We visited a few schools. When asked what is the biggest challenge that a school faces, the answer was always the same: feeding the children and paying the teachers.

There are miracle workers at some of these schools. I saw a teacher with nothing but chairs in her room (and hungry children sitting in the chairs), but the students were more disciplined and more learning was occurring than in any of my best days as a teacher.

The people love soccer. It is in their blood. Soccer truly is the universal sport. The clip at the beginning of the video is from a "senior vs. sophomore" soccer game, and the little kids are cheering for the sophomores after they just scored a goal. Let's just say that I went crazier than I ever had for a touchdown at Notre Dame stadium. It was bananas.

They need help to feed their kids and pay their teachers. If you want to help out, you can send money to our fund that we started. Our goal is to raise $50,000. The money goes straight to the kids and families you see in this video, and many are refugees of the recent earthquake. There is no middle man. This is not the Red Cross. The money gets wired directly to the school to help the kids and to support their learning. Shoot me an email if you want more information at tony@tonysclassroom.com

The head of the school told us: "You can't develop a country without education."

The world is my classroom, and I learned so much from the people of Haiti.

Whenever I am trying to improve a situation, I am faced with a choice: do I continue doing the same thing that is currently producing mediocre results with the hope that it will eventually pay off, or do I try something that could be unfavorable but also has the potential to be incredibly beneficial?

I am always trying to improve things, whether it is my class, my school, or lately, my own life. With the help of a friend on a canoe trip, we conjured up a phrase that adequately describes my own perspective on what to do in this situation:

“I would rather prove myself wrong than wonder if I could have been right.” continue reading this post

No one is really afraid of failure. No one has fear of trying something and then failing. What people truly and deeply fear is criticism.

I wrote a math book last year, and when I was writing it, I would occasionally get filled with fear. I told myself that I was afraid of failure. I told myself, “You are afraid of putting much work into this book and then nobody wanting it.”

But when I looked at my fear, I found that I had no fear of failure. My greatest fear was not that the book would go unwanted, but that people would criticize me for it. I feared getting emails that said, “This book is horrible. Why would I ever use it in my math class?” I feared meeting someone who had used the book and having them tell me, “I can’t believe how many mistakes there are in the book. It is embarrassing.” I feared somebody telling me that my website is confusing and useless.

Fear causes a person to cave in on their selves. I often thought to myself, “Why put myself in a position of criticism? Why shouldn’t I just write a small manual for my students? Why should I risk criticism?” The fear at times was crippling, but it was NEVER because of the fear of failure. In fact, the fear actually caused me to occasionally desire failure. I would think to myself, “If I never hear a comment about this book, that is good, because no comments mean that I didn’t make anyone upset.” continue reading this post

Have you ever had the chance to visit a National Park? Have you seen the sun set over the rim of the Grand Canyon? Have you walked through alpine tundra in the Rocky Mountains? Have you hugged a giant sequoia that shoots 300 feet into the sky?

If you haven’t, you should.

If you have, then you owe a large debt to those who gave these great gifts to you. You see, I am a great lover of democracy. To me, democracy is about the freedom to create a world that is better than you found it. It is freedom to give yourself to a good cause. And here in America, there is a never-ending fountain of democracy-loving people who laid the foundations and passed on gifts of splendor to future generations, and our national parks are one such heritage. continue reading this post

I always thought that accomplishing a dream is a simple process, but this was before I accomplished any dreams. Now I know better. Every dream I have fulfilled has followed a set of stages, and these stages all have their own unique timing and characteristics that make up the lifecycle of a dream. If you want to live a dream, and not just to think about your dreams, be prepared for the stages below. (Note: if you want to prevent fatal collapse of your dreams, be sure to read stage #8). continue reading this post

This past year, I had to make a difficult decision: take some time away from teaching to go explore a foreign country and do some things that I always wanted to do, or to keep teaching at a school that I really liked. The reasons for continuing to teach were obvious: I enjoyed doing it, I had worked at it for 5 years and was just starting to hit my stride, and my school was awesome. However, there was this nagging feeling inside of me that I needed to go on an adventure. I wanted to go study Spanish in a Spanish-speaking country, and I wanted to do some things that I had never done before, such as go Scuba Diving and ride a horse at full speed. I had a tough decision to make, but in the end, it was the easiest decision I ever made. It started with a simple realization that there is no such thing as “risking it all”. continue reading this post

It is amazing what you learn when you are by yourself.

A few summers ago, I went to Santiago, Chile to improve my Spanish and to visit a foreign country. There were many things that I wanted to do in Chile, but I was most excited about the opportunity to go to a big-time soccer game.

I had been told by other Chileans that soccer in Chile is "just not as exciting" compared to soccer in other South American countries, but after attending this game, I realized that South Americans have a radically different understanding of the word "excitement".

Allow me to set the scene. I am about 2 miles from the stadium, and my first sign of "crowd enthusiasm" was a group of 30 Colo-Colo fans. At first, I just thought they were loud and excited and simply thought that throwing toilet paper and paper confetti EVERYWHERE was a good idea, 2 miles away from the stadium. Then, when one of the buses refuses to pick them up and tried to drive right by, they started spitting at the bus, kicking it, and throwing their whole wads of toilet paper at the windshield. Luckily the light turned green before they could do too much damage, and it sped off.

I knew it was only going to get more interesting from there. continue reading this post

(Photo: 2composers)
You can know a lot about a person by the type of plane seat they pick.

The people that deliberately pick a window seat are different from people that pick an aisle seat. An aisle seat is about comfort, ease, and familiarity. A window seat is about discovery and adventure. And just like every adventure, there is a price, a “cost of admission” to the views. If you are in a window seat and you have to use the restroom or get something out of the overhead compartment, you have to inconvenience everyone in your row to get out. In a window seat, you are also sandwiched between the immobile wall and another person and so your legs do not have as much freedom as they do in an aisle seat. Worst of all, if you are in a hurry, a window seat is problematic because it takes you a little longer to get out of the plane. You never know how many time-pressured people are going to rush in front of you before you can even get into the aisle and remove your bags. continue reading this post

On a beautiful day in the summer of 2005, I hopped on my bicycle for a ride amidst the cornfields of Indiana. I always liked to ride my bike but I never rode more than 10-20 miles at a time, so I wasn’t going far. As I was riding, the thought occurred to me that the following summer would be a good time to fulfill my dream of riding my bike across the country. As I approached the end of my ride, I got more and more excited about the trip. I thought of all the adventures I would have, and I thought about how much fun it would be to ride across deserts, mountains, and cornfields and to go cross-country with a bunch of friends. I became more and more enthusiastic envisioning the whole trip until, finally, something within me snapped. I made a definitive decision: the following summer, after my second year of teaching, I was going to ride my bike across the country.

You must understand that I knew absolutely nothing about how this trip would work. I didn’t know how to fix a flat tire, I had never ridden more than 20 miles on my own, I didn’t know how much it would cost, I didn’t know if anyone else wanted to come, and I had no idea about where we would start, where we would finish, or the route we would take. There were so many unanswered questions that needed answering, but the decision had been made: I was going to ride my bike across the country, even though I knew absolutely nothing about how to make it happen. continue reading this post