I have spent thirty years in schools, and I am still at it, working with at least thirty students every single day. I have been the classroom teacher, the reading and math interventionist, the behavior interventionist, and the person a building leans on when a kid is falling through every crack at once. None of that is a resume line to me. It is most of my life.

I was born without a right hand (Limb difference), so I have spent my whole life finding another way to do the things in front of me. That is where my work really comes from. Resilience is not a topic I picked up at a conference. It is how I have lived since day one, and it is what I have been teaching kids, in one form or another, for thirty years.

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Somewhere in there, I got tired of the way we talk to teachers. The message is always some version of "the system is broken, take care of yourself." Both halves are true, and neither one helps you when the kids walk in. The system is broken. And a bubble bath does not change what happens when twenty-six kids walk in the door. So I built the other perspective, the part nobody hands you: what a teacher can actually do something about. I called it Purple Bunnies, and I have been growing it for thirty years. Years later, the science of motivation and resilience caught up and named what I had already watched work: that resilience is not a mood or a personality; it is built through clear goals, a real path, and the belief that you are the one who can walk it. You can teach it. You can build it. And when you do, in a kid or in yourself, the hard days get shorter.

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Today Purple Bunnies is a K-12 social-emotional learning model and a set of tools simple enough to use without a planning period: a reward routine that does more than redirecting ever will, a way to find and cut the friction that is quietly exhausting everyone, a game that shows why some kids seem to need so much and how to keep up without running yourself dry, and a series of children's books. I have read one of them, Dawson's Tunnel, to about a thousand kids, and watched a room of them learn to name the feeling on the other side of a hard thing. Honestly, that is the whole job.

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The official parts: I am a National Board-certified teacher, trained in LETRS, RULER, Love and Logic, and culturally responsive education, and grounded in the science of motivation, resilience, and change. I have led teacher book studies and literacy work through ESD 101, mentored new and student teachers, helped revise Washington's learning standards, and served on national assessment panels. I have presented to district administrators and at equity summits. I hold a master's in curriculum and instruction and a bachelor's in elementary education.

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When I am not in a school, you will find me fly-fishing or out in the rugged country of the West with my horses and my family. But the reason to bring me in is not the list. It is that I have done the actual job long enough to tell you the truth about it, with enough humor that people leave empowered instead of overwhelmed, and I will hand your teachers something they can use before they even leave the room. If that is the kind of speaker or partner you are looking for, reach me at trishdotts@gmail.com.