I Beat the Odds_ From Homelessness, to the Blind Side, and Beyond - Michael Oher [56]
I can't talk enough about the time and work Miss Sue put into helping me. She is retired now, but she deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. She was such a hugely important part of my success both in high school and in college because she was the one who really gave me the confidence to know that I could learn, which is the first step in beating the odds.
Sue Mitchell was an Ole Miss grad and a high school English teacher who had been teaching in the Memphis schools since long before I was even born, so she knew what she was doing and she knew how different people study. She was the perfect person to help me tackle my classes.
As one of the most important parts of my support structure, Miss Sue shared my short-term and longer-term vision for myself. My goals were to 1) graduate high school, 2) qualify to play NCAA football, 3) go to college, and 4) play in the NFL. Looking at me on paper with my still-too-low GPA, those goals must have seemed impossible. But Miss Sue didn't judge me based on my transcripts and she didn't make assumptions based on my past. She looked at me as a person, as someone who was determined to do whatever it took to succeed, and she believed in me--truly believed in me--from day one. She didn't treat me in a patronizing way, like I was some little kid who needed applause or a crazy person with impossible dreams. She encouraged me and cheered me on, but she also kicked me in the butt and made me buckle down when that was what I needed, too. And I responded to that because I knew that she wasn't doing it for show. She believed that I had it in me to do what I wanted to do because I'd already come so much further than anyone would have ever expected me to.
ONCE I MOVED in with the Tuohys permanently, Sean and Leigh Anne decided to look around for a tutor to work with me in the evenings to help me get my grades up to where they needed to be for college. Miss Sue was the person who stepped up and started coming over to the house, five nights a week for four hours at a time. Since I had sports practice after school, we usually didn't get started on my homework until after six, and many nights we'd work until after ten. Sunday through Thursday (since I had games on Friday nights), she would sit down at the big dining room table with me and we would tackle my class assignments one by one.
I would read things on my own; we would read things out loud together; she would make me take notes on whatever we discussed and then encourage me to review them before going into class the next day. She also knew I was good at memorization, I guess because of having to remember the playbook in football, so we did a lot of memorization work to help me get the material in my head and then convert it into my own words to make that knowledge my own.
I don't know how many hours she spent going over things until I really got them. I wasn't just interested in learning for a test and moving on. I needed to know that I could learn whatever was necessary to succeed. Sometimes it took a while, but she never lost her patience. Well, she probably did lose her patience, but she never showed it.
The whole family got into that--especially Sean. He loves poetry and jumped at the chance to talk about it. Collins made sure her schedule matched with some of my classes so that we were able to study together, too. Everyone around me was pitching in to help me reach a potential I never knew I had. I mean, I never doubted that I could do whatever I set my mind to, but I had no idea that I could accomplish