The Big Fresh October 12, 2013 Winning Deal

I’m down to only one game app on my phone these days. I play Solitaire, and I have it set to “winning deal,” which means that every hand I’m dealt is guaranteed to have a solution.

I’ve had many conversations with myself about what it means to choose “winning deal.” On the occasions when I’m feeling critical, I berate myself for taking the easy way out instead of embracing challenge.

The story I most often like to tell myself, however, is that choosing “winning deal” represents my core vision of optimism: I believe that life is a “winning deal.”

I believe that every child in my class will succeed in some way, shape, or form.

And I don’t believe that “winning deal” is necessarily the easy way out with no challenge, or the “rose-colored glasses” view of life. With an outlook of “winning deal,” the challenges are simply defined differently. Instead of the typical goal of trying to win at Solitaire, I try to win in the quickest, most efficient way possible. Since I believe that every child will succeed, my challenge is to get each one there on the most efficient, lasting path possible.

For the fifth-grade boy who comes into my classroom with a defiant belief in himself as a nonreader, my challenge is to guide him along a reading path that starts with the easiest graphic novels in my class library and steps gently and gradually up to books with more and more text that is increasingly complex.

For the Iraqi girl whose family has been in this country for exactly five days when she enters my classroom, my challenge is to start with the universal language of a smile, and the most basic English labels necessary for her to navigate the world of our classroom and school.

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