By Derrick Brown (follow on Twitter @dbrowndbrown)
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Watershed: Hope, Healing, and Change on a “Crooked” Path (1174 Words)
By Derrick Brown (Join Our Mailing List!)
NOTE (10-13-2025): This is the
preface / introduction to a book I have written for publication. It explains the "journey" that produced the book. The book’s
working title is GRASPP: A “Crooked” Path to Patience
There comes a moment in every long journey when the traveler looks back ... not
to retrace steps, but to recognize the terrain.
I am standing in that moment now.
One hundred and twenty days of writing have gathered like tributaries into a single river of witness, washing over years of silence, containment, and fatigue.
The waters are not calm, but they are clear.
They have carved valleys of understanding through stone-hard memories, eroded self-doubt into sediment of faith, and now converge at this watershed ... where hope, healing, and change meet the courage to publish.
When I began journaling on May 28, 2025, I was simply trying to survive.
The words were not meant for an audience ... they were meant to keep me alive.
Teaching had become a terrain of contradictions ... a calling that both fulfilled and fractured me.
I was the “Brother from Another Planet,” fluent in multiple languages of care … yet perpetually mistranslated by the institutions that claimed to value equity.
My creativity was admired in theory, surveilled in practice, and often dismissed as “too much.”
But writing ... the act of naming, narrating, and remembering ... became a kind of refuge, a portable sanctuary where I could build peace … in the presence of tension.
What began as documentation became transformation.
Each journal entry became a meditation on grace, resistance, and accountability.
Each reflection pulled me closer to a truth I had long resisted … that peace is not a prize for those who avoid conflict … but a discipline for those who learn to breathe inside it.
My classroom was my laboratory ... a living, unpredictable text in which my students and I were both authors and audience.
Together we stumbled through “CAP TRAP” problems, debated area formulas, wrote “bars” about re’sume’s … and learned what patience looks like when tested by apathy or arrogance.
Every correction was an act of care ... every frustration, a lesson in humility.
Slowly, I began to name the framework that was guiding me, though I had been living it all along ... GRASPP ... Grace, Resistance, Accountability, Sustainability, Patience, and Peace.
These were not abstract virtues ... they were survival strategies.
Grace taught me to pardon without permitting.
Resistance reminded me that truth requires tension.
Accountability demanded that I examine my own patterns before indicting others.
Sustainability invited me to balance conviction with rest.
Patience reminded me that peace is not passive ... it is practiced, step by step, through “crooked” paths that lead toward clarity.
This book, GRASPP: A “Crooked” Path to Patience … is the living artifact of that process.
It is a tapestry woven from daily entries, roleplays, songs, and field notes ... a document of both endurance and evolution.
It is what happens when reflection matures into revelation.
It bears witness to how creative pedagogy and spiritual discipline can merge into one rhythm ... the rhythm of healing.
The heart of this journey has always been relational.
My classroom stories are not isolated incidents ... they are mirrors of broader human patterns.
“Care and Feeding,” “Boundary Value Problems,” and “Lizard Liability” were never just lessons about math or management ... they were parables about the fragile ecosystem of trust.
Each day tested whether grace could coexist with accountability … whether love could survive bureaucracy … whether peace could exist amid constant noise.
These questions did not end at the school door.
They followed me into my home, my church, my community ... the other “classrooms” where I teach … and am taught.
Through all of it, my family remained the steady rhythm beneath the noise.
My wife’s patience, my daughter’s light ... they were the constants in equations that refused to balance.
When Hannah turned thirteen this week, I saw in her laughter the reflection of every reason I began this journey.
She is becoming her own story, clothed in grace, humility, gentleness, and patience.
Watching her grow is a lesson in legacy … the peace I pursue must be sustainable enough to outlive me.
My creative practice ... what I now call #StandupStorytelling ... became the vessel for this legacy.
What began as classroom coping evolved into a public pedagogy … performing songs like “Re’sume’ Say” or “Born(e) Witness” in front of students and colleagues … turning reflection into dialogue … dialogue into empathy … and empathy into learning.
The Empath Remixes roleplays grew from this same soil ... dramatizing moments of conflict … not to relive them, but to release them.
Every reenactment became a rehearsal for healing.
Every “Selah” ... that sacred pause ... was a reminder that silence, too, can be a form of strength.
Now, standing at this threshold of publication, I realize that my journal has become more than an archive ... it is an altar.
It documents not only what I endured, but what I became.
It reveals that “containment” can never confine the spirit … once it learns to see itself as witness rather than victim.
The same “crooked” paths that once confounded me … have now become coordinates on a map toward meaning.
Publishing GRASPP feels like crossing a river … whose current I have studied for years.
I know its depth, its pull, its hidden undertows of doubt.
Yet I step forward anyway, because I now trust that the current does not exist to drown me ... it exists to carry me.
This is not a victory lap ... it is a baptism.
The waters of reflection have been turbulent, but they have washed away everything that was not essential … fear, resentment, the need for institutional validation. What remains is peace ... not the absence of struggle, but the presence of clarity.
The act of publishing is both an ending and a beginning.
It is the moment when private journaling becomes public witnessing … when internal healing becomes communal hope.
I am not seeking applause or approval ... I am seeking alignment.
My work invites others ... educators, artists, ministers, and everyday survivors ... to locate themselves within the framework of GRASPP … to trace their own crooked paths toward patience.
Because the truth is, we all have them.
We all walk roads paved with paradox ... grace that costs … peace that aches … love that disciplines.
This watershed moment reminds me that growth does not always feel like progress.
Sometimes it feels like surrender.
Sometimes the miracle is simply staying ... staying reflective … staying open … staying human.
As I continue this work, I hold close to a single conviction … that my words … once written in isolation … now belong to a larger fellowship of those who believe that stories can heal systems.
Hope, healing, and change are not destinations I have reached ... they are companions on this ongoing journey.
Hope keeps me writing.
Healing keeps me humble.
Change keeps me alive.
Together they carry me forward … through each crooked turn … toward the destination I now understand … not as completion … but as continuation.
Selah.
(The "Follow The Leader (changED - Volume 2)" Audio and Video Album / Mixtape is also available at TeachersPayTeachers.com)
(The "changED (Volume 1)" Audio and Video Album / Mixtape is also available at TeachersPayTeachers.com)
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I am a “standup storyteller.”
I fuse rap, spoken word (poetry), oration (traditional public speaking), singing, and teaching into messages of hope, healing, and change that I write, direct, and produce to help people who help people.
Everything must change - and stay changED.
Tradition begins and ends with change.
Change begins with me and the renewing of my mind ... then continues through efforts to effect small-group discipleship (equipping others to equip others) with audiences that respect and embrace mentoring, mediation, and problem solving as tools of change.
I am the product of my mentoring relationships, peacemaking (and peacekeeping), and problem-solving ability.
My education began when I finished school.
After school, I enrolled in a lifelong curriculum that includes classes in ministry, entrepreneurship, stewardship, literacy, numeracy, language, self-identity, self-expression, and analysis / synthesis.
My projects execute a ministry that has evolved from wisdom earned through lessons learned.
I want to share this wisdom to build teams of "triple threat" fellows - mentors, mediators, and problem solvers.
We will collaborate in simple, powerful ways that allow us to help people who help people.
I now know that power is work done efficiently (with wise and skillful use of resources, interests, communication, and expertise).
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