Playing the Hand You're Dealt
troy_williams, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0> Raised in a surfing family, Bethany Hamilton competed professionally as a child. She was going to be the greatest, everyone said. At 13, she lost her arm and almost her life in a vicious shark attack. How could a surfer compete with part of her body missing? But in a little over a month she was back on a surfboard and doing what she had done before. If she needed to learn to do things differently, that's what she did. If she needed to work on a skill that other people took for granted, she would do it. When I taught at Cooper, I was told at the beginning of the fall semester that one of my students would be coming in later than everyone else because of a car/trailer accident that his family had but to leave room in the Junior English class. Sure enough, Coby came loping in one morning with a big goofy grin on his face. But it was almost a shock because his head was encased in a halo or halo ring which mean...