I know what I must do...

The alarm goes off at 5:45 a.m. just like it has all my working life. Only now, I don’t work.

But I don’t let that detour me from the routine. I get up and make coffee before I report to my desk. Only it is not at a radio station or a college. It’s in my Mancave. There I make myself go through my routine of reading a half-dozen newspapers via the Internet and answer my e-mail. Then I do what does not come naturally. I look for work. A job. Never been unemployed in my adult life……so this is not a mindset that comes easily.

I am not retired. That will come only after a successful stint of my choosing.

For a couple of weeks I have contemplated what the next step should be……should I venture out of education? Should I venture back into communications? Maybe greeting at Wal-Mart?

But today it all became clear. I’m an educator. It took a student to bring me to the realization that I had ventured away from what made me happy. That’s making a direct impact on the lives of students.

Rita Frazer sat across from me almost thirty years ago and asked what she should do with her life? She was barely out of Jerseyville High School and she was struggling as a college student in the radio broadcasting program at Lewis and Clark Community College. I asked about her passions and discovered she lived on a farm in Jersey County. Her folks had moved into mid-Missouri to work at a nuke power plant, leaving her behind on the farm.

I suggested she combine her passion for agriculture with broadcasting. She went on to get a high profile internship at the premier agriculture network in the nation, The Brownfield Network, and immediately landed a job as the morning farm broadcaster at WSMI Radio in Litchfield, Illinois. Rita is now, in my opinion, the top farm broadcaster in Illinois and co-hosts “RFD Illinois,” heard on every small radio station in the state. Some big ones too.

She, like so many of my former students, reached out to me when the headlines started cranking out about my resignation. Rita said she knew exactly what I should do. She encouraged me to pursue some professional speaking engagements. She even contacted some of her colleagues who book speakers for conventions and the like.

I’m entertaining the idea. I think it would be fun.

The point of this whole blog is this…..

I was having a bad day. They happen when the highlight of your day is feeding the dog.

As I put together a “one-pager” to promote Dreith, the banquet speaker, I asked her to give me a quote to put within to possibly entice an electric co-op to spend a couple hundred dollars to have me speak after a pork chop dinner.

I got it a few minutes ago.

When I read her words, it became apparent what I must do.

She wrote of me, “As a former student, I was moved by his passion to teach and determination to change the lives of young people through education. He saw in me potential that few others saw and helped me to develop my passion for agriculture and radio into a most fulfilling career.”

I felt a tear roll down my cheek.

There it was. That is why I committed three decades of my life to my career.

Clearly, it took a former student to teach me what I had seemingly forgotten over the last few weeks…and to re-commit to doing what I love best.

It’s all about students.

Thank you Rita….and God bless you.

Time for me to spend my time getting back to my passion.