By Coleen Armstrong

Teacher, talk-show host, and author of The Truth About Teaching: What I Wish the Veterans Had Told Me

In January, Tony was sitting in his high school English class. He was a little worried about his future.

Just a year later, he was standing at white-gloved attention as a member of the U.S. Navy Presidential Honor Guard at the Inaugural Ceremony in Washington D.C. At one point he was positioned a mere three feet from the President.
 
Tony once had almost zero self-confidence. He constantly doubted himself. No matter how many speeches I made concerning his enormous potential, he stared back as if to inquire, “What potential?”

But now he realized that everything about him had changed. He was more muscular, less timid, more focused, less anxious. He’d incorporated permanently into his attitude one of the U.S. Navy’s most cherished tenets: Excuses are not an option.

Tony could have found plenty of excuses for not doing well. He grew up in a rough neighborhood, lost his mother to cancer at age 12, then soon afterward lost his alcoholic father to the streets. He finished school only by boarding with friends’ families, including the pastor of his church.
 
Unfailingly polite and respectful to adults, he must have been an easy kid to have around. Still, even as a senior, he still had no idea what to do with his life. Finally he decided to join the Navy––for what sounded at the time like a pretty flimsy reason: “I liked the uniforms.”
  
But his real agenda was the hidden one, and it was as worthy as they got: “I didn't want to live my life in the Projects. I wanted to get out--–and do better.”
 
So Tony enlisted and then left for a Chicago base mere hours after receiving his diploma.
 
Boot camp was just as grueling as he’d heard it would be. Wakeup calls at 3:00 a.m., constant marching, drilling and calisthenics, lessons in etiquette and clothing maintenance. Then, after only three weeks, a strange thing happened. Tony grew to like it. Something about the intense discipline appealed to him––perhaps because so much of his young life had been so undisciplined, so chaotic.
 
After only twelve more weeks he was plucked out of the ranks for Honor Guard consideration. Of the 100 or so trying out, fewer than fifteen were selected. Tony was among them.
 
Returning to Hamilton for a visit, he said, was quite an eye-opener. Tony stared in dismay at the aimless middle-schoolers he saw wandering the streets. He shook his head.
 
“People blame where they grew up or the situation they’re in to justify staying there,” he said. “But where you come from should never limit where you’re going.”
 
Tony already had his eye on an officers’ training program and eventually a criminal justice degree. Quite a leap for a young man who once didn't think he had much potential.
 
For an hour he was relaxing a bit, revisiting his former high school wearing his full dress uniform. He lounged in a chair near my window, his long legs stretched like stilts, his jet-black shoes shining like mirrors, his lean frame boasting what looked like a mere 12 percent body fat. He contemplated the worlds he’d conquered since last sitting in that room–-and the even vaster ones still lying ahead of him.
 
A slightly built senior approached. “You in the Navy?” the boy inquired.
 
“Yep,” Tony answered.
 
A pause, as the senior considered his own prospects. “They be hollerin’ at you?” he demanded.
 
Tony caught my eye, and then he smiled, a secret, conspiratorial smile.
 
“Not anymore,” he said.

Coleen Armstrong’s distinguished teaching career includes several state and national recognition awards.  She is the author of Please Don’t Call My Mother:  How Schools and Parents can Work Together to Get Kids Back on Track and The Truth about Teaching:  What I Wish the Veterans had Told Me.  Ms. Armstrong will present at the 4th Annual Reaching At-Promise Students National Conference in February, 2009.