On January 2, 1922, in Dallas during the Dixie Classic (the forerunner of the Cotton Bowl), an Aggie, E. King Gill, was called from the stands to suit up as a substitute, hence the phrase “Twelfth Man.”
- Campusology #6
I was surprised when the door to the classroom where I was teaching high school burst open and a group of administrators and teachers entered with smiles and a whole lot of positive energy. I stopped leading the lesson about geography and walked over to see what it was all about. My principal Mike Jasso handed me a brass plaque and shook my hand. On the plaque was written:
Andrew Patterson, 2016-2017 Coppell High School Teacher of the Year NOMINEE
While I could certainly read the plaque and understand what was going on, Mr. Jasso explained to my students that I had been nominated for teacher of the year and was one of the finalists along with several other teachers. Naturally, my students began to applaud. When the clapping concluded I thanked Mr. Jasso and the other teachers as they departed and I returned my attention to my students. Before saying anything, I paused awkwardly for just a moment and then calmly stated, “Okay anyways, back to geography before I was so rudely interrupted…” All my students laughed. We collected ourselves and then continued the lesson.
As the school day continued, I pondered the recognition I had just received, even if I didn’t actually end up winning the final award. I was definitely grateful. I had never planned to be a teacher but I had to admit I liked it. I was with students I loved in a place where they acknowledged hard work. But the celebratory moment also sparked another thought within me. In between talking with my students about the finer points of geography such as population demographics and how international trade regulations affected the physical landscape, I began to ponder the course of my life. I considered where I was at the moment and maybe what I would be doing in the future. It was something I did all the time. I needed to be honest with myself because I had been a teacher for seven years and I wanted to understand exactly how I felt about that.
Honestly, I was bored and ready for my next adventure. Don’t get me wrong. My life was wonderful and filled with numerous blessings. I was married to my college sweetheart with a nice house in the suburbs and three adorable dogs. I had held a few different careers as I attempted to figure out what I really wanted to do with my life. I found myself teaching geography at Coppell High School in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, my alma mater where I had graduated twenty years prior. It was a great setup because people knew me and I had a blast interacting with some of the same teachers that I had annoyed back when I was a kid. It may sound cliche and corny but I loved being there because I enjoyed the environment. It was positive and uplifting and seemed like everyone was there to help each other out. Sure, it was absolutely hard work that exhausted me every single day. Teaching is incredibly labor intensive, especially if you actually care about the kids. And I definitely did. I loved my students. My awards as an educator proved that I cared at least somewhat about my job. But I wasn’t ready to settle down, kick back in my recliner, and wait until retirement just yet.
To me, life was a gift and I had a deep passion to live it to the absolute fullest. My father had shown me the movie Dead Poets Society when I was younger and I took the film to heart. In the movie, the character John Keating played by the late Robin Wiliams is a teacher who inspired his students to get the most out of life. When he meets his students on the first day of class, he shows them old black-and-white pictures of students who had attended the school decades earlier and had since passed away because they grew up, got old, and died. Mr. Keating encouraged his students to examine the hope and potential in the faces of the former students who had at one time been young just like them in order to urge everyone to get the most out of life because it goes fast. In the intense and moving scene, Mr. Keating whispers into the ears of his students, “Carpe Diem. Seize the day. Make your life extraordinary!” Caught up in that moment myself as a spectator of the movie, I made a vow that I would never waste my life and would always give it everything I’ve got.
With that in mind, I worked to be the best teacher I could be. I had become a teacher with a passion to guide and inspire kids the same way Robin Williams playing the character John Keating motivated me. Sometimes I would even do the same things Mr. Keating did in his classroom. At one point in the movie, he gets up on top of his desk to encourage his students to stand up and examine the world from a different point of view. Don’t doubt for one second that I didn’t get up on top of my teacher’s desk to motivate my students to do the same. I loved my job. I gave it everything I had each day. But I also recognized a subtle yearning in my heart to get out in the world and discover more. I had found some success and purpose in the classroom and was inspired to take it to the next level.
At that point, I had a bachelor’s degree but yearned to push myself intellectually and pursue conversations on a grander scale. I hadn’t been in school for a couple of decades and I knew I would need to warm back up before jumping to a higher level. Since I was teaching geography and had fallen in love with the subject, I figured I should start with that and get another bachelor’s degree before attempting anything else. My original degree had been in communication but at the time I felt a deep need to prove something in what I perceived to be more scientifically based research. I didn’t really understand what that meant specifically, but I had been watching movies like The Day After Tomorrow and wanted to be like the lead character Jack Hall who was called up before politicians because of his academic expertise in research. After all, one of my other passions was helping people to be prepared for emergencies and larger-scale disasters. Prior to my time as a teacher, I had a career as a firefighter and paramedic where I learned first-hand the importance of getting people prepared. I figured geography based in the geosciences with a focus in human geography would be perfect because there were always great conversations about how humans react to the environment and the continually increasing risk of larger-scale catastrophes as the global population continued to expand.
If you are unfamiliar with human geography, it's the study of human populations and how they interact with each other and the environment. I loved it and had begun to know the material so well that my students consistently received high scores on the AP exam and my YouTube channel explaining the principles of human geography for students had become a national resource for all human geography teachers and students. So I applied to geography programs at several universities around the country. Because I already had a bachelor’s degree and had been teaching the content, I figured my application would look pretty good. I recognized that I lacked higher-level academic skills but I knew I could write with passion and purpose in a manner that connected with the admission boards at various institutions. So I applied to several programs and waited. In the meantime, I lived life as normal.
For me, normal was pretty average, I would say. While I wanted to be extraordinary, and some might have said I was already pretty inspirational at the time, I hadn’t yet reached that level in any one of my pursuits or personal qualities in my own eyes. I was a decent-looking and charismatic guy, I guess, but was consistently a bit heavier than I wanted to be. I was strong physically but also soft in areas I didn’t want to be, like my gut. I would work out hard from time to time but was never completely consistent and my diet was nothing to be proud of. I would eat healthy for a few days but then reward myself with a big binge weekend or devour nachos and cheese sticks whenever I felt I needed an emotional boost. So I wasn’t really in control of myself emotionally. I drank a lot every single night simply because it tasted good. I loved to just relax with a delicious vodka or whiskey and kick back in my recliner after a long hard day of teaching a bunch of wonderful yet high-maintenance students. But I think deep down, I drank a lot because I was disappointed with myself.
I would say my life was average because I never consistently manifested the man I wanted to be. Instead of being disciplined, I allowed excuses and compromise to rule my day-to-day decisions. More than that, I was weak spiritually. Yes, I loved the Lord with all my heart and had given my life to Jesus when I was a young boy, but I never felt like I stepped out on faith the way I really wanted to. Actually, I would say there were times I did step out on faith but had become frustrated and felt like God rarely backed me up when I did. I loved the Lord but only spent time reading the Bible and being in prayer when I felt like it. Back then I did a prayer time most mornings but I really couldn’t tell you how consistent it was. Maybe it was almost every morning but then I would never really think much about God or the wisdom in his scriptures the rest of the day. I’m being hard on myself because I really did desire to follow God and I read his word and prayed consistently. It’s just that I was so weak mentally throughout the day that I mostly thought about whatever seemed to influence me in any given moment instead of possessing the kind of focused discipline I longed for.
I wanted to be a man like some of the characters I grew up watching in the movies. I had a deep desire to be like the Scottish hero William Wallace in the movie Braveheart. Yes, it was a fictitious film loosely based on actual history but Mel Gibson playing the larger-than-life Wallace was exactly the kind of man I wanted to be. In the movie, he was disciplined and uncompromising. His body was lean and muscled up. He was able to fight incredible battles and lead men toward greatness with his charisma and inspirational speeches. Before the first big battle, Wallace rides his horse courageously in front of his army and urges them to stand and fight because if they don’t, they might live a little bit longer, but the English will take over Scotland. If that happened they would all regret not standing to fight and forever have wished they stood up when they had the chance. As the music swells, Wallace yells out to his countrymen, “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” His entire army cheers and they prepare for battle. I wanted to be just like that.
I too wanted to live a life of adventure, meaning, and greater purpose. But what I think I liked most about Wallace and other heroic movie characters like him was their ability to bounce back from continued adversity. I wanted to be resilient just like them. But I wasn’t. I was weaker than I wanted to be physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. When the character Wallace explained, “Every man dies. Not every man really lives” I took it to heart, just like the charge from Mr. Keating to seize the day in the movie Dead Poets Society. I wanted to live like those two men. But as I looked around me, what I saw was compromise and disappointment in myself. I wasn’t disciplined spiritually like I wanted to be. My mental focus was less than admirable. I made excuses for things I did with my body. And every time I came up against an obstacle in a moment of adversity, I would crumble. I had some resilience but it wasn’t well defined in my life. At that point, I would say I was more defined by compromise.
For example, when things didn’t go my way, my language was atrocious. You might think that someone who wanted to serve the Lord would take to heart the wisdom of the scriptures that explained things like “A fool gives vent to his anger’ (Proverbs 29:11). Yet, like everything else, I rationalized my anger and made excuses for cursing and letting the frustrations I felt inside rule my life. It would commonly happen when I came up against adversity. And the various types of adversity were mostly very small, like a traffic jam keeping me from getting where I wanted to go. It would not be uncommon for me to absolutely lose it when I happened to get slowed down just a little bit in traffic. Or if I was teaching and maybe the internet was down, preventing me from preparing my next lesson, I really let my emotions get the best of me. Sure, there were bigger things I had to commonly deal with like anyone else in the world but mostly I was getting caught up and making compromises due to all the little things. Almost every time, small instances of adversity or even just inconvenience, would knock me off course.
Once again, some people might have said the way I talked in a moment of frustration was fine and natural. But for the kind of man I wanted to be for God and for myself, I just wasn’t getting it done. I was undisciplined and I made excuses for each and every compromise. Most people who knew me probably would have said that everything about me and my natural compromises from time to time were just fine. But it wasn’t for me. Deep inside, when I really took the time to examine myself in the mirror, I wasn’t happy with myself and I knew it. I wasn’t happy because I had not yet become the man I had always wanted to be. I had only a glimpse of resilience but it would fade at the slightest hint of adversity. So really, I had little resilience at all. Sure, I had done some good things and was proud of a few of my accomplishments but deep inside I knew I had a long way to go.
When it came time for my annual teacher review, my principal Mr. Jasso, who was a wonderful man and leader, asked me to expand upon the goals I had set at the beginning of the school year. As planned, I had specific objectives planned out using all the empowering educational buzzwords that were grounded in the latest research stating things such as:
Dimension 3.3 Classroom Culture - To foster a collaborative learner-initiated classroom environment which will allow me as the educator to give individual and small group attention to learners who are identified as needing additional instruction to meet the goal of our Advanced Placement Human Geography team, I will flip my class and provide application activities in both my classroom and the blended lab in lieu of lecture so students can learn to be self-reliant, allowing me more time with learners who need additional instruction and focused practice.
Sounds awesome right? And it was. What we did as teachers in Coppell was just amazing. And it was all backed up by a district that supported innovation. During that specific year in 2016-2017, “flipping the classroom” was a huge buzzword which meant that students would watch videos of the lesson before coming to class so I could work with them directly and answer any questions they had to keep us moving forward and get farther into the content instead of waiting every day for me to lecture. The “blended lab” was also something that was pretty amazing. During some of my class periods, I could send students into the lab to work on computers and access the material while I stayed back in the room to work with students in more of a small group or individual setting. Without question, my school and district were a fantastic place to work. Or at least it had been up to that point.
Normally I would do great during my annual review, but that year, I just wasn’t quite up for the challenge. When asked by Mr. Jasso to expand upon my goals and reflect on what we had done in the classroom, I began in my normal manner to relay the specific things I did, but fell short as my brain refused to even finish the sentence I had started. I had been way overworked that year because of the number of students I was responsible for and honestly I was kinda just done. To be specific, I was exhausted by the workload of teaching and it had increased year to year. This is a very common experience for teachers all across our country. Plus, I wasn’t strong mentally at the time and any obstacle I came against would always beat me down. So in the meeting with my wonderful principal, I was just tired. Startled that I had dropped the ball in our conversation because I was always good at talking, Mr. Jasso asked me what was wrong. I told him I was exhausted and truthfully I was. From my experience, most teachers over the course of their career, whether lasting thirty years or only one, will ultimately reach a point where they have given absolutely everything without much energy or emotional stamina left in reserve. Let’s face it, motivating a ton of needy kids year after year at the top level is wonderful yet extremely draining. Because of many variables, the burden and responsibility of teaching and all the associated tasks just add up.
That year in 2017, I had 206 total kids in my classes that I worked hard to inspire. That’s an average of 30 kids per class and I taught seven classes every single day. If you are not a teacher, I humbly request that you really consider that burden. You have to keep up with 206 kids while teaching seven classes, every single weekday. I loved it. They were my audience and I got to perform in front of them every single day. But I was also completely drained because it was my responsibility to push and grow every single one of them. The trouble is that many of them didn’t really want to be inspired. And when one kid fell through the cracks, it was my job to pick them back up. That’s a huge obligation to continually fulfill.
If you are a teacher, you get it. It’s a lot. If you’ve never been a teacher it’s okay to not understand. My wife Lara taught school for fifteen years before I became a teacher. During that time, when she came home exhausted and frustrated about trying to get things done but not being able to because of the enormous responsibility and overload, I simply didn’t understand. It’s not even close to the same when you are a substitute teacher because that’s almost an illusion. Yes, you have to keep the kids in line, but you really aren’t responsible for making sure every single kid passes your class. For the full time teacher, the burden is enormous. You see, in this country these days there is an understanding. If a kid fails, it's your fault as the teacher because you failed to provide them with the individualized learner-specific education they needed to succeed. So if you haven’t been a teacher and don’t understand why it’s so excruciatingly difficult and draining, then it’s okay. I didn’t get it either. In fact, when Lara would come home drained after a long day at work with the kids and all the other responsibilities, I just couldn’t understand what was making it so exhausting. And then I became a teacher.
It’s not just pushing the kids to get their work done and actually learn something. In fact, that might be the easy part compared to all the other responsibilities that get piled on you. Add in things like grading all the assignments and essays, planning lessons each day, bus duty, lunch duty, department meetings, parent conferences, special education meetings, 504 meetings, staff meetings, and extracurricular responsibilities like the clubs you are asked to sponsor. Then add in the endless emails and training that you are supposed to keep up with. Needless to say, by the spring of 2017, I was tired. I loved my job and absolutely adored the kids. My principal, the administrators, and all my teacher friends truly were amazing. But I was just plain whipped. I recognized it was time to make a change because I wasn’t doing a great job handling all the stress. To deal with it, commonly I would cuss all the way home through traffic and kick back in my recliner while eating a significant amount of sugary, fatty, junk food and wash it all down with alcohol.
But I think even more than the work overload, without really realizing it, over the course of the forty years that I had been alive, I developed an awful habit of taking the big and small blessings of my life for granted. Yes, I loved my job at Coppell. It was a wonderful place because it was my home. It truly was a positive and inspirational environment filled with kids and faculty that were supportive and fun. But I also whined about it a lot. Although I was good at my job, I took it for granted and walked around with an underlying cynical attitude where I felt like everything in my life was good but not what I really wanted it to be. I didn’t realize it at the time but I put up that negative, condescending front because deep inside, I wasn’t yet the man I had always wanted to be. Mostly no one would ever know that I thought such things because in fairness, I was a pretty positive and outgoing supportive guy to everyone around me. It’s just that on the inside, I buried the disappointment of the person I had become. Yes, life was definitely good, but everything about me felt average.
One of the things I wished to enhance was my education. Growing up I had looked forward to attending a major university where I could play baseball and enjoy all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the excitement of being in college. For example, my parents and so much of my extended family got their degrees from Purdue University in Indiana. It was exciting to watch the Boilermakers in various sports on TV and talk with everyone in the family about the games. Many of my friends that I graduated high school with had also gone to big-name places like the University of Texas, Texas A&M University, Duke, UCLA, or even MIT, and Harvard. Those were places I had always wanted to go because people across the nation knew them and it appeared to me that my family and friends who graduated from such fine institutions always had great stories. I had always wanted to join them in that experience.
But because I came out of high school with a focus on playing college baseball, I exchanged the goal of attending a major university with the opportunity to follow my dreams. My freshman year, I had a scholarship to play ball at Sterling College in Kansas which is an NAIA school. As far as athletics are concerned, NAIA is comparable to NCAA Division III institutions. But after injuring my arm early on, I decided to start fresh and come back near home to attend Austin College, an NCAA Division III school, which is located about an hour north of Dallas. That was fantastic as far as being around my family who would come to watch me conveniently for a lot of my games. The trouble was that our team was so bad that we hardly ever won. Not that I contributed much to the effort myself. I was just your average small college athlete who probably would never make it on a major Division I team at a big university. I had a blast with my college baseball buddies and strolled around the beautiful campus there in Sherman, Texas. But as far as baseball was concerned, the dream of playing professional baseball after college was coming to an end.
The other takeaway from my time in college during my early 20s was that I never applied myself. Sterling College and Austin College were beautiful and fantastic places filled with amazing professors, administrators, and students with lots of opportunities to grow. But I didn’t take advantage of those opportunities. It was during that time that I began to transition from a person who looked at the world with optimism and zest to a guy who made excuses and took every blessing as a curse or major let down. Instead of enjoying my time in baseball, I was so focused on winning that I didn’t find any joy in just playing the game that God had given me. And because we rarely won, you can imagine that much of the time I was quite miserable. There I was, a college athlete wearing a beautiful baseball jersey, but I was so frustrated by our level of play that I was always down and disappointed. And in my classes, it was pretty much the same. My attitude was terrible.
I obviously had a certain level of intelligence but I refused to apply it. I didn’t try at anything and skated by with an attitude of condescension. In one specific instance, a wonderful professor by the name of Dr. Hunt Tooley, who I later became friends with and came to deeply appreciate, called me out in front of the class because I hadn’t said a single word the entire session.
“What do you think, Andy?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” was my only reply.
Dumbfounded, he prompted me again, “You don’t know?” And then there was just silence. He repeated my own words back to me, clearly encouraging me to respond with both of us knowing that my participation grade was on the line. I said nothing and only shook my head. Dr. Tooley moved on without further pushing the matter.
The truth of that moment was that I hadn’t read the chapter in the book that the professor was asking me about. But more than that, I just really didn’t care. I was uninterested and found no joy or purpose in the entire experience because I was lazy and so focused on myself that I could not see the blessings all around me. But looking back many years later, I would have given anything to have the exact conversation we were having. I even remember exactly what we were talking about. We were discussing Machiavelli’s The Prince, a text that discusses the justification of immoral means to achieve power over the people. If I would have only paid attention, read the book, and dug into the material, I would have come to understand that the moment probably would have provided me with fodder to fight the battles I was consistently losing with myself. But I was too undisciplined and full of pride perhaps to admit that I didn’t know enough to just pick up a book and do the work.
Why did I act like that? The truth is, I’m not quite sure. Looking back on it now, I guess I started to simply discount the opportunities around me in exchange for the easier path of complaining and being lazy. Maybe it was easier to act like I was better than everyone around me as a subconscious way of protecting myself from actually having to try. I think I just had a really weak mental capacity that was mixed with grand desires to be a better person than I was. The problem was that I never tried. I simply accepted mediocrity because it was easier. My life at that point was starting to be disappointing so I simply acted aloof and continued to take everything for granted. That’s not what I showed everyone else on the outside for the most part. Certainly not my parents or family members. But I’m not sure I really understood that was what was happening at the time because on the outside, I’d say that pretty much everyone knew me as a super nice, fun-loving, positive guy. And honestly, I was. Yet more and more, I took the blessings God had given me for granted. I was disappointed in myself and let any obstacle be my excuse for not even trying. To protect myself from being hurt, I had learned to put up a cynical front that created a barrier of protection and allowed me to accept the explanation that I really didn’t want the big things anyway, or perhaps that they were actually beneath me.
That same sentiment continued into my teaching. I would work really hard because I loved the kids but I did it from a cynical and condescending perspective. I didn’t act that way toward the kids because I loved them. It was just something I mostly kept hidden inside. Even when I won the Super Teacher Award, was presented with a plaque, and was taken out to lunch with a few other winners from across the district, I really didn’t care. I remember driving away from the event and seeing the other teachers taking pictures and celebrating being recognized for all their hard work. The other teacher I was riding with who had also won tried to suggest that we should stop to get our pictures taken but I just kept on driving. I cared not one bit about having my picture taken because I was cynical and disappointed in the person I had become. Although I have to say, I did make sure to post the plaque in my classroom and put the accomplishment on my academic resume. But still, in my mind, I told myself I was above such things. I took it and almost everything else for granted. It was my excuse for continuing to live below where I thought I should be. I didn’t realize it at the time but that is how I protected myself and covered up my disappointment with who I had become. It took me years to realize that this was what I was actually doing. But I couldn’t see it at the time.
Despite the exhaustion, challenges, and cynical ungrateful outlook, I was doing good things and living a solid life. It’s just that I wanted a great life full of outstanding experiences lived through an exemplary body. The reality is that my life back then was very good. It truly was. God had blessed me with a whole lot to be thankful for. I had been through several experiences where I had to trust God and step out on faith. I had done some really amazing things in life and was proud of those accomplishments. I had been a professional firefighter and paramedic for the city of Sherman, Texas for seven years where I worked with a great bunch of guys to save lives, homes, and other various forms of property. I produced several short films and three full-length feature films that screened at festivals around the country with two of them winning several awards and eventually gaining distribution. My crazy low-budget adventure horror comedy Let There Be Zombies premiered to a sold out crowd of over seven hundred fans at the historic Landmark Theater in Dallas and Prepper, a story about a teacher who started to believe it would be a good idea to be prepared for disaster, premiered to an audience of five hundred fans at the historic Texas Theatre. Both films were picked up by distributors and available on multiple platforms.
I had continuously been paid or volunteered to work with kids in churches ever since I had been a youth in church myself. And I was consistently recognized and awarded for my rapport with kids and innovative teaching in the classroom. I had done so many great things over the course of my life and I was a really good person at heart. It’s just that I tended to take all those gifts for granted and I never felt like I measured up to the man I truly wanted to be. When I looked in the mirror, I realized I wasn’t anywhere close. I was consistently falling short of the vision I had of myself and I wasn’t quite sure how to get there. The resilience I wanted was nonexistent because, at the slightest attack of adversity, I would break. Yet thankfully, the Lord was about to open a new door for me to head in the opposite direction and provide me with an experience I had always wanted.
I will never forget the moment I received my acceptance email from Texas A&M. It was April 4, 2017. Because I would officially be recognized as an untraditional undergraduate transfer student returning for another degree, I didn’t receive the traditional celebratory physical mailed package with all the Aggie maroon material. I was a little disappointed but it was fine by me because I wasn’t looking to take away from the younger crowd, those high school seniors who were posting to social media and celebrating attending college for the very first time at a major university. I was the old guy attempting to reclaim some of his youth but not expecting everyone else to understand. That being said, when I received the email, I immediately ran downstairs to tell my wife Lara. She was sitting at the dining room table when I told her. I sat down with her and put my face in my hands while tears began to stream down my cheeks. I could not help it. I recognized that I was a 41-year-old man who had already accomplished some really cool things in life, but I had always wanted to prove myself at a major university. Now I would finally get my chance. For the first time in what seemed like decades, I felt a wave of relief as the doubt I harbored about myself was lifted from me and an incredibly exciting thought slowly entered my mind - I am going to be an Aggie. I could not believe it. I wanted to run around my suburban neighborhood and shout it out to the rooftops. I was incredibly grateful and excited. But I also understood that now there were many details to work out that I had no idea how to line up.
While I was overjoyed about getting into the university, there were multiple logistics problems. Lara and I were both teachers with a mortgage and car payments and I didn’t exactly have the spare income to pay for tuition, much less know what I would be doing for a job once I left my position as a teacher. We had been used to two solid incomes and this was potentially going to change everything. I really had no idea how things would work out financially. Looking back, it seems so straightforward now to understand that all these details would just work themselves out. But in the moment, while I celebrated the opportunity, I also harbored a lot of doubt.
However, while I may have been a compromiser in many aspects of my life, stepping out on faith was one thing I had done consistently. If I got everything else wrong, by God, I had no trouble believing that the Lord would take care of me if I only had a little bit of faith to take a risk. I had learned to take big risks when making movies and putting my passion out there for kids at church or in a school classroom. Now it was time to put myself out there for something I really desperately wanted and just go for it. I had been accepted to the university. I already got past the most difficult obstacle. The next parts would just be the exciting details that would all work themselves out. Or at least I hoped and prayed.
A few days later, Lara and I took the weekend to travel down to College Station, the home of Texas A&M University. It was a trip I had made one time before but it had been over two decades. I still remember the tour I had taken with my father twenty-five years earlier and I recalled the mixed feelings of awe imagining actually going to such an incredible place but also disappointment with the realization that I would never go to A&M. My father and I had gone there simply as tourists. But this time things were different. I was accepted and walked around campus as a future student, not just a wishful dreamer. While I still had some financial doubts, I figured I could just apply for loans to pay tuition and a job to work on the side. I was pretty sure we would make it happen.
Standing in the visitor’s center on the first floor of Rudder Tower, I began to feel the weight of my situation. I had stood in this very same place with my father way back in the early 1990s when I was just a kid. I had longed for this experience and now, finally, this was going to be my home. I was going to be an Aggie. This time, standing there with my wife and waiting for the tour to begin, the tears of joy, excitement, and relief began to roll down my cheeks. I was so happy to finally be there that I was actually crying. Honestly, I don’t think I would have it any other way. If I had gotten to be an Aggie as a normal college student at a much younger age, I’m not sure I would have appreciated it. Now with a lifetime of experience and yearning behind me, I fully understood the opportunity before me and recognized the open door within my next step. This was one heck of an incredible gift.
Perhaps it might seem corny or over-the-top for a 41 year old man to cry at being accepted to a university. Maybe such things are just for younger kids who have all their lives ahead of them. But I had waited for this moment and longed to have the prestige of going to Texas A&M for a very, very long time. Growing up I had so many close friends that had gone to A&M and I had always wished I went with them. By God, I was going to let myself enjoy this moment and soak up every single tear of joy that I could. I was incredibly grateful and would not allow the moment to pass without cherishing it. As we walked the campus, I couldn’t believe that I was finally getting the opportunity to attend such an incredible place. I know it sounds just like Aggie rah rah hype but you have to understand… I had finally made it. For real.
During the tour, perhaps one of the most motivating aspects was seeing the cadets walking around confidently and crisply in their perfectly groomed uniforms. It was fascinating to me as I observed from a distance. But the most impactful aspect was the crisp white and maroon Texas A&M patches on the sleeves of each cadet. I wanted to wear one so badly. There was just something amazing about the cadets as I watched them walk by. They were so confident, so disciplined. In a big way, they represented a lot of what I was missing and what I wanted to be. But I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was a middle-aged man with a beard. Although I was impressed and honestly in awe of the cadets I had witnessed strolling around campus, I didn't give it much more consideration. I was just happy to finally say I was a student at Texas A&M. Yet as Lara and I drove back to our home in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, a subtle and quiet thought began to grow inside of me. What if I could be a cadet? I had no idea if a 41-year-old man was even allowed to join a much younger student organization. But then again, I was now going to be a student. So why not at least reach out and give it a try?
When we got home I immediately jumped online and found the official Corps of Cadets website informational page. After a little searching, I discovered a guideline that stated any student attending Texas A&M is eligible to join the Corps. I was shocked. I paused and analyzed the words… ANY student. There was no listed age limit. Still, I doubted they would allow a 41-year-old dreamer to participate. But I continued my investigation, located the adult responsible for recruiting, and sent him an email inquiring about my eligibility. I fully expected a terse reply scolding me and telling me that I was too old. I was ready to get laughed at over email. To my surprise, the next day I received an email from an adult administrator. I read quickly to the bottom of the email to discover his name was Colonel Samuel Hawes. Going back over the details of the email I was surprised to read that I was welcome to be a member of the Corps. He told me to come and join the organization if I wanted. I couldn’t believe it.
Ten days later we were back down in College Station to look at houses and so Lara could interview at a couple of school districts in the morning. That afternoon we attended an open informational meeting regarding student undergraduate research. I listened to Dr. Christian Brannstrom, a professor whose paper I had read before even applying to A&M, talk about research opportunities in geography. It was exciting. Along with his talk, a senior cadet got up to speak about the research opportunities he had taken advantage of. After they spoke, I felt like a star-crazed fan as I approached Dr. Brannstrom and the cadet to talk about geography and then possibly being in the Corps. I have to admit that I was excited but intimidated by both Dr. Brannstrom and the cadet. I was almost embarrassed asking the cadet about his time in the Corps as I meekly let him know that I was considering joining myself. When I told him, I saw his face slightly change. I couldn’t tell if he thought I was ridiculous or if he considered me way too old to take up such a challenge. I couldn’t really read the look on his face but I could tell he was holding back something. But I would never know what it was. I finished speaking with him and then excitedly told Dr. Brannstrom that I had read his paper about the wind farms in west Texas and visited them because I had family out there and was interested in how the new turbines were affecting the landscape. He was kind and generous as we spoke. Little did I know that just a few months later I would be in his class. Talking with Dr. Brannstrom was encouraging and I felt the meeting feeling like geography was definitely the right step for me. But the more distance I had from the brief chat I had with the cadet, the more I began to analyze the look on his face and the more I questioned my ability to even be a cadet.
The truth was, I was no spring chicken anymore. One of my colleagues back at Coppell High School had told me that when I informed them I would be leaving my comfortable job with consistent pay. And they were right. In fact, in a way, I felt kind of like a broken old man. Although it had been a couple of years, I had been nursing a broken right foot that never healed correctly and continued to be in a moderate amount of pain. I had broken it in the middle of the night while it was pitch dark by smashing it into an angular wooden bedpost. It might sound like such a thing wouldn’t cause much damage but the way I misjudged where I was in the dark and how fast I was moving, let me tell you something, it was excruciating pain. It woke Lara up from a dead sleep. She got out of bed, turned on the lights, and we discovered my foot with skin ripped off. That’s how badly I wrecked it on the surface and it must have hit the bedpost just right because it actually broke the large knuckle bone in the biggest toe of my foot. I wish the story could have at least been something more exciting like maybe I broke it in a fight defending some abandoned orphans in a back alley or maybe fighting through a house fire in order to rescue some kids. But nope. I broke it in the comfort of the suburbs from the safety of my quiet home at night. To be honest with you, I drank a lot back then. I don’t really recall if I had been drinking the night I broke my foot but the odds are that I drank way too much and busted my foot on the bedpost. Whether I was loaded with alcohol or not, my foot was broken and it continued to hurt because it never healed correctly.
In any case, I broke it right on the knuckle of the big toe, where the entire force of my body pushes off at every single step throughout the day. At the time of injury it hurt but I didn’t think much of it. I just let it heal on its own. The trouble with that strategy was that it never healed correctly. After seeing three different specialists regarding the matter, the results were always the same. The foot had definitely been broken by that trauma. It had healed itself but not in a good way. I could have surgery on it to attempt to fix it but it would probably always hurt no matter what I did. Two of the specialists even suggested rebreaking and fusing the toe so that it didn’t move at all but it would be frozen in a slightly upward position so as to ease the rocking motion while walking. But then I wouldn’t be able to wear anything other than very soft athletic shoes. Yeah, none of that sounded good to me. Besides, I didn’t have time to go through surgery and wait for recovery. I was going to Texas A&M and joining the Corps.
The good news was that I wasn’t doing any further damage to the foot. The bad news was that it hurt. Sometimes it hurt so bad it just throbbed and I would have to sit down, keep it raised, and ice it. I remember having a discussion about my foot with the members of our men’s Friday morning breakfast Bible study group. We had been praying for it to be healed and it hadn’t worked. I was complaining that even wearing dress shoes as a teacher was giving me a really hard time because the rigid shoes were pressing down on my broken foot making life pretty miserable. God had not chosen to heal it. Now I was about to tell the men praying for me that I was going to join the Corps and work that foot even harder. I wasn’t sure that was the best idea but I still hadn’t made an official decision. I remember the good men at the Bible study being concerned that I might injure my foot even more by joining the Corps and running on it. I certainly took that into consideration.
A couple of weeks later we returned again to College Station to take a Uhaul trailer load to preemptively begin the enormous task of moving all the items from our two-story house that we had accumulated over twenty years of marriage. I met in person with Colonel Hawes who I discovered was the Assistant Commandant of Recruiting for the Corps. Walking into the Sanders Center and seeing the museum of cadet uniforms and memorabilia was incredibly humbling yet motivating. I continued to be surprised by the acceptance regarding my possibility of joining as a goofy older guy. Colonel Hawes was incredibly warm and kind. Although he was retired from the military and had that hardened warrior look, he was nice to me and talked me through the various details of joining the Corps. I felt a lot better about the possibility but still, I had to admit that I was intimidated by him and all the other older military men and women walking around. They seemed to carry themselves with confidence and strength as if they didn’t put up with any baloney. I wanted to be like them and have that feeling but compared to them I just really felt like I was a corny middle-aged buffoon. Yeah, I had been a firefighter and that brought me some confidence for sure, but I think more than that I just greatly respected their time of service and what they had done to wear the uniform.
I have to admit that I was also intimidated by the cadets. They all walked with pride, purpose, and extreme discipline. I had grown up and spent time around a whole lot of adults who weren’t as confident and polished as them. I certainly didn’t feel that way on the inside at the time. But I felt good about joining the Corps when I spoke with Colonel Hawes. If it weren’t for him, I most likely would not have joined. He opened the door for the opportunity and allowed me to consider it seriously. As I pondered my options, we visited College Station several more times over the next few weeks to look at houses and for Lara to lock down her job. Thankfully, she was hired the same day she interviewed at College View High School which was located right across the street from the A&M campus. Now it really seemed like things were in motion. Lara would be starting there as a teacher in the fall. All I had to do was find a job myself.
Back in my classroom at Coppell, I taught my final lessons and tried to soak up as many memories with my students as possible. On one of the last days when most of the stress of the school year was behind us, I took the opportunity to walk around the high school campus. I loved it. I truly did. That wonderful place had been my home for four years back when I was a student and had been my home again for another seven years as a teacher. I really felt like I was about to graduate twice. Both times there were so many people who believed in me, supported me, encouraged me, and trained me to be a much better person than when I had first arrived. I walked around campus on the insides and outsides of buildings just reminiscing, feeling grateful, and making sure leaving such a place was what God wanted me to do. I remember praying -
God, I know the blessings of what you have given me here. I’m a celebrated teacher in one of the top districts in the state. Our campus facility is huge, state-of-the-art, and beautiful…
At that point of the prayer, I was standing outside in front of the football stadium. It was big. I had a lot of memories there as a student and as a teacher. It was daytime but I remembered the crowds cheering, lights blazing, band blasting, and activity all around me. I loved so much about that stadium.
God, are you sure you want me to leave this place? I mean, it’s awesome!
My question to the Lord sat there for just a moment before I felt the quietest and most subtle understanding pop clearly into my mind. I didn’t hear a voice but I did discern an obvious reply…
The football stadium at A&M is way bigger.
I got goosebumps. The image of Kyle Field, the massive football complex at Texas A&M University, loomed with anticipation in my hopes and expectations. Yes, Coppell High School was big and filled with three thousand crazy and wonderful kids. But Aggieland was WAY bigger. Maybe that response wasn’t actually from God. I mean, would God really speak to me about the different sizes of football stadiums? Maybe it was just my own thought process but the answer came to me very clearly. I had reached the plateau of the man I was going to be right here where I was. The only way for me to grow any further was waiting for me at my next step. All I had to do now was go. Kyle Field at A&M held over 100,000 people and is one of the biggest stadiums in the world. Now was the time to either take that next step, or not.
As the famous story of Aggie lore has been told, Texas A&M was engaged in an epic football battle versus Centre College in 1922. Hampered by injuries to many of his players, the coach looked up into the stands and called on a student, E. King Gill, to suit up just in case more players became injured. Gill did not hesitate. He suited up with the uniform of one of the injured players and stood ready on the sidelines for the rest of the game. While Gill never got the chance to play, he remained standing, always at the ready. Because of his act, standing ready to back the team remains one of the greatest traditions in Aggieland to this day. Every home football game, the entire student body stands for the entire game. E. King Gill became a symbol of hope, strength, and support. At Texas A&M University, Gill is celebrated as a hero.
Kristen Okamoto (2020), a professor and communication researcher currently at James Madison University, explains that one key aspect of resilience is the commemoration of heroes. For an individual or organization to enhance their ability to bounce back from adversity and overcome crisis, a helpful endeavor is to examine successful and larger-than-life role models to emulate. An individual or organization can bolster their resilience by patterning their response to adversity based on their heroes. Generations of Aggies had come to understand the power of simply standing to support each other. In this way, the eleven men playing football on the field weren’t just standing by themselves. They were backed by thousands in the stands right behind them who would become their twelfth player, the 12th Man. Together, they are resilient. A community that stands together can make all the difference. Gill was commemorated as a symbol, a hero to thousands of Aggies. There is even a big statue of him standing heroically at the northeast corner of Kyle Field. This is how he was commemorated. Soon, he would become a hero to me. My act of standing alongside the rest of the entire student body as an official member of the 12th Man was just about to begin.
Resilience Lesson #1: Resilience celebrates the commemoration of heroes.
Question: Who is your hero and how does their story help you find your own resilience?
-- This blog post is one chapter in a book titled I Bleed Maroon by Andrew Christjoy that is being finalized and seeks publication.
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