Foster Care Book: Chapter 21

Chapter 21 - Some Useful Tidbits

The following has some really useful information for kids:

14 Lessons Not Taught In School

Written by Charles Sykes -- Read by Paul Harvey on June 7, 1997

1. Life is not fair. Get used to it!

2. The world won’t care about your self-esteem as much as your school does. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.

3. You will not make forty-thousand dollars a year right out of high school and you won’t be a VP with a car phone until you earn both.

4. If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss - he or she doesn’t have tenure.

5. Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for flipping burgers; they called it opportunity.

6. If you screw up it is not your parents fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

7. Before you were born your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way cleaning your room and listening to you telling them how idealistic you are. So before you save the rain forest from the blood sucking parasites of your parents generation, by delousing the closet in your room, remember how boring you will be come from the same malady.

8. Your school may have done away with winners and losers but life hasn’t. In some schools they’ve abolished failing grades. They’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.

9. Life is not divided into semesters, you don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

10. TV is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shops and go to jobs.

II. Be nice to nerds. Chances are you will wind up working for a nerd.

12. Smoking does not make you cool, it makes you moronic. Ditto for purple hair and pierced body parts.

13. Living fast and dying young is romantic only until you see one of your peers at room temperature.

14. Get up when you fall down. Michael Jordon has missed the basket nine thousand times. M.J. has lost three hundred games. Twenty-six times M.J. has been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed.

I would like to add one more - -

15. Teenagers go out and get a job so that you can leave those stupid parents forever while you still know everything!

MJ says over and over and over again, "I have failed. That’s what it costs to succeed."

Most of the best baseball players in the world don’t hit much over three hundred. They are out 2/3 of the time. They fail more often than they succeed but they keep trying. The best quarterbacks in the NFL rarely reach 50% passing completion, half the time they fail. They keep trying! GET UP WHEN YOU FALL DOWN!

I have had three different careers and have gone broke once. Those are the things that make strong individuals. Thank God for a wonderful woman or I probably could not have made it! That’s another message -- most people need help from someone else at one or more times in their lives. Asking for help when it is needed is a sure sign of strength.

The following piece written by a social worker tells the story!

A SALUTE TO FOSTER PARENTS AND SUPPORTERS OF YOUTH IN CARE

by: Teresa Keller, Nottoway, Va. Department of Social Services

Such a thankless job you do

And no one knows what you go through

You’re called at all hours, both day and night,

And asked to rearrange your life.

You may have plans for a weekend of bliss;

It’s hard to remember you asked for this.

You straighten your shoulders and open your door -

Your family has increased one more time.

In walks a stranger, or two or three,

With lots of baggage, but no clothes, you see.

You hustle about and find what they need,

And wonder how this will ever succeed.

They come to you from broken homes

With broken hearts and broken bones,

Hungry and dirty, and mad as can be

That they were taken from their family.

You know very little about their past

Or if this placement will even last. You give them love and try to teach A better way to a child you can’t reach.

But please remember, through stress and strife The things you are doing may change a life. Take it on faith, for you may never know What they take with them when they go.

You are showing them a better way.

Perhaps they will thank you one of these days.

When they are grown and on their own They’ll remember the things they learned in your home.

And in this season of loving and giving

For folks like you, its a way of living.

You give all year of your home and your heart, And do the job with few rewards.

So please remember when things get tough -And you feel that you can’t do enough -You’re already doing more than you know

By tending His children, He will bless you so!!

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