I knew I wanted to be a teacher ever since I was eight years old and a student in Mrs. O’Leary’s third grade class. An exceptional teacher, Mrs. O’Leary did not treat her students as mere “vessels to be filled” with reading, writing and arithmetic, but as individuals worthy of her time, respect and consideration.  She always made me feel as if she had nothing but time for me, that I was a person with value, that I mattered.  Having an exceptional teacher that year was just short of a miracle for me.  It was an incredibly difficult year with overwhelming challenges.  At home, my mom was struggling with her second bout of breast cancer while also working on her doctorate and although I did not know it at the time, she was also in the beginning stages of alcoholism. Needless to say, she wasn’t very available to her family, especially to me, the oldest child and her only daughter.

Around this time I was beginning my own devastating journey into compulsive overeating.   Three years earlier, at the innocent age of 5, I had been sexually abused by a babysitter, who also happened to be my next door neighbor.  Like many victims, I kept silent and allowed the traumatic events of that horrifying day to take on an almost dream-like quality of unreality.  What I could not escape, however, were the very real feelings of guilt and shame, and the sense that I was somehow at fault.  I began eating constantly in an effort to stuff down those feelings, and perhaps, on some level, create a barrier with my weight so nothing like that could ever happen to me again.  By the time I was in third grade, the effects of my eating were starting to show up not only as extra weight on my short body, but also in my extremely disruptive behavior in class, my lack of responsibility for my studies and my stealing food out of my friends’ lunch boxes and money out of their desks to buy ice cream.  There was no amount of food that could choke down the feelings of shame, loneliness and inadequacy that I was feeling.

To make matters worse, I didn’t want to go out to recess because I knew I would get bullied.  The other students called me Bahama Mama, told me how fat and ugly I was and no one wanted to play with me. Mrs. O’Leary showed great compassion and understanding toward me and allowed me to stay in during recess to help her.  I graded papers, made learning centers and created bulletin boards.  I found that I genuinely loved it and her!  She not only provided me with a safe harbor, she introduced me to two things that were to become my life’s passion: education and the desire to help others know their inherent value.

I will be forever grateful to Mrs. O’Leary for loving me at a time when I felt unlovable, and showing me the importance of developing authentic relationships with students. Though I still had several difficult years ahead of me, Mrs. O’Leary helped lay the foundation for my path to a healthy, productive and fullfilling life.  Not only did she help the road map to the work I would do for the rest of my life.

Fast foreword 35 years.

I had gone from barely getting by in school with no sense of self to living a passionate life of purpose.  I had found my calling….  In June of 2006, as a result of being honored as Disney’s Outstanding Elementary Teacher of the Year, at the end of that school year I left the classroom and the school system I loved to share what I had learned about bringing joy, meaning and purpose back to teaching and learning.

For several years leading up to my departure, I was becoming more and more disillusioned by what was and was not happening in education.  Like so many other educators, I had gone into teaching to make a difference in the lives of children, and yet, now it felt as if all I was doing was pushing my students as hard and as fast as possible.

With all the focus on testing, rigor and accountability where was the L-O-V-E? Love for our students, love for our vocation and the love of learning itself. It didn’t seem to matter what all of the research suggested about what was most important with regard to learning and helping children grow up to be happy, healthy, productive world citizens. Remember the three Rs of relationships, relevance and rigor?  Well, we had pretty much kissed relationships and relevance goodbye.

Receiving the Disney honor put me on the path, which led me to The Virtues Project. During the professional development week of my Disney experience I had the opportunity to spend some one-on-one time with David Vixie, the overall Disney Teacher of the Year. One afternoon we were taking a water taxi back to our hotel and I was so grateful to have some alone time to find out what made him such an inspiring educator.  So I asked him, “David, what in your repertoire speaks to you the most?”  He took out his wallet and pulled from it a worn and tattered business card sized piece of paper, but it wasn’t a business card, with words such as courage, compassion, confidence, gratitude, honor, integrity, love, self discipline, service, and more and the URL www.virtuesproject.com When I read those words I gasped out loud, chills ran up my spine and tears ran down my cheeks, every word written on that card resonated to the very core of who I was as a teacher, and these words were what I wanted for each of my students.  It was the very reason I went into education to begin with.

After the boat ride ended, I raced back to my hotel room, jumped onto my computer, found the virtues project website and ordered everything I could having it overnighted.  I knew I had found something truly transformational. After 20 years of teaching, I was finally liberated from the Sunday anxiety pangs from the fear of possible power struggles or classroom management challenges I might encounter.  As soon as I returned to school the following Monday I immediately started using The Five Strategies of the project in my classroom., I was now equipped with The Five Strategies of The Virtues Project and I had the confidence and the tools to create a peaceful classroom and empower my students to thrive.  It was such a liberating feeling .

Now that I was using the tools of The Virtues Project joy, meaning and purpose had been restored to my kindergarten class. However, after school I would open up the front door of my house and walk in on my 12 year old son and my fiery redheaded 15 year old daughter screaming like banshees at one another, sibling rivalry was at an all-time high, the house was a mess with jackets, shoes and backpacks strewn all over the place and they were incredibly disrespectful to one another and myself.

It was during a fit of frustration, bordering on rage, that I remembered what happened when Linda, one of the founders of The Virtues Project, appeared on Oprah.  Oprah said of The Family Virtues Guide, “Parents are always saying children don’t come with a guide book, this is one.  This helps you get them on the right track for leading a good life.”

So holding The Family Virtues Guide in one hand and a set of Virtues Project Educators’ Cards in the other, I was now armed with instructions for raising my children. So I called a family meeting

The four of us sat at the dining room table:  my son Jake, my daughter Dani, my husband, Dave and me.  I turned to page 31 of The Family Guide, which was the chapter on how to set family ground rules, and then asked my kids if they wanted to read the few pages or did they want me to read them. Rolling their eyes in unison the only time they agreed with each other they said, You do it.

After I finished reading from the guide, I looked up and saw the kids still totally disengaged, so I took the Educators Cards and through them across the dining room table. I invited each person to pick a virtue they wanted to bring into our family.  My daughter picked “Respect,” my son picked “Flexibility” my husband picked “Responsibility” and I picked “Orderliness.”

We each read our card aloud and then we chose one to put through the process of using a virtue as ground rule.   We all agreed on Respect.   The first thing we did was make a list of what we wanted respect to look like in our home.  For example, when you knock on the door wait for someone to say, “Come in” (so you don’t accidentally walk in on your naked stepdaughter).  If you borrow something, give it back when you are done.  If you are talking to someone, give him or her your full attention. Use kind language and tone even when you are upset.

Next, we discussed the consequences.  If you do not return something you borrowed, you may lose that privilege in the future.  If you are multitasking while talking, the electronics get turned off or taken away for a period of time.  If you choose not to use a respectful tone or language, you go to your room until you can get into a peaceful place, make amends and ask for what you need in a respectful way.

After we listed our ground rules and consequences, I gave everyone a piece of florescent lime green paper and asked each family member to fold it into quarters, put their name in the center and write one of our core family virtues at the top of each box.  My firey15-year-old redhead put her hand on her hip, cocked her head and said, “Great, so now when we are not doing the virtue you are going to write it down!”  I gently responded, “No. When I see you exhibiting a virtue I am going to give you a virtues acknowledgement.”  And with that, Dani’s whole body relaxed and she responded with a relieved, “Oh.”

Up on the refrigerator went the four virtues cards and four pieces of lime green paper.  True to my word, I started looking for everyone’s virtues.  The results were surprisingly immediate.   I walked into the powder room and the towel was on the towel rack instead of the floor.  So I wrote on Jake’s paper in the orderliness box, “Thank you for your orderliness hanging up the towel on the towel rack.” If I had just put “thank you for your orderliness,” Jake would not have known that hanging things up is orderly.  And if I had just written “thank you for hanging up the towel on the towel rack,” he may not have known that hanging things up is the virtue of orderliness.

One night Dani joined us at dinner instead of going out with her friends.  On her sheet under flexibility I wrote, “Dani, I honor your flexibility by having dinner with us instead of going out with your friends.”

The next morning I woke up, walked into the kitchen and as I went to open the refrigerator I glanced at the virtues sheet with my name on it.  Dani had written something that made me stop cold.  Under respect she wrote, “Mommy, thank you for taking the time to write acknowledgements on our sheets.”  I was shocked and totally blown away, everything had changed in less than 36 hours, identifying and acknowledging our family’s core virtues had already made a significant impact on my family. Sibling rivalry had ended in my home forever.