Passage 1

I have personally come to understand that “empowerment” is not a lesson that can be thought by way of textbooks or lectures, projects or field trips, and not even by way of principles and inspirational teaching. It must be taught by personal examples.

When we ask our students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, or those, who face a personal lifestyle this in direct conflict to the principles that we teach, we have to be willing to show them how to overcomer, how to make the transition from one state of being into the next, how to be empowered. We must make the lesson of empowerment come to life, in a real, up-dose and personal way. And the only way this can be done is when we al low ourselves to become living examples of what we teach.

Preparatory school for Global Leadership (PSCL) is a school that I started because I believed that I had method, a way of teaching and learning that would empower the urban disadvantaged child. But as l sit back and think about it now, PSGL was a school that I started so that I would showcase empowerment to a group of students (and stuff) who needed a real life, example of how to grow beyond one' s current circumstance.

When l reflect on my journey of starting the school, I realize that every step along the way was personally teaching about empowerment. It is one thing to teach it, but it is another to live it. Unless we experience empowerment on a personal level, we can not help students learn it, circumvent obstacles as they arise and develop and employ the new skills needed to function to be empowered.

How can we get in the face of a student and push him to a place that is foreign and scary, asking him to become greater than his environment? We can't, why? Because we do not know what it lacks like, we do not know what it feels like. Our role as a teacher becomes technical, causing us to miss out on the spirit of truly good teaching, where one teaches with relevancy, authenticity and experience.

When I look at the faces of these students, I know that my process of starting the school was for them. When I became what I taught, when I empowered myself in spaces where there was no one there to empower me, when I chose to succeed without excuses, I became a living lesson.

These students saw me and our staff as extensions of the lessons we were trying to teach. Our lives, not by our perfection, but by our effort, showed students how to apply what we taught.