Clarification

I need to learn Spanish

Is it normal for something to bring you joy yet make you heavy hearted at the same time?

I respect all of the teachers that I’ve had, but at the same time, I wish they had shown all of their students, including me, more love.

There was a group of girls on Monday who gave me fake names. Normally I think this would be funny (and it was certainly funny to them) but at the time it wasn’t funny at all. I don’t even know why it disappointed me that much. Being an after school science club, the teacher didn’t even know who they were so there was no way of knowing what their real names were.

Being the supervisor, I don’t actually teach the lesson, I’m more of the classroom manager and I check up on the students individually and talk to them and make sure they understand what’s going on.

The four girls with the fake names didn’t speak English very well and they spent most of their time speaking to each other in Spanish and not paying attention to the lesson at all.

I really loved them - the girls who lied to me. I stayed with them most of class, helping them at least be able to grasp a little bit of what we were learning. I wish I could know the background of their lives and be able to talk to them.

I remember looking at every student in the classroom and just wishing I could spend time with each of them, just getting to know them.

I wanted to tell some of the students that they didn’t yet realize how smart they were. That if they kept working hard and didn’t care about how cool they were or what other people thought of them, they would definitely go places.

I wanted to tell some of them that it was too early to give up. If they worked hard toward an ambition or dream, if they knew they had a chance of going to college, then they could also do go places. Their future isn’t already written out for them.

I went to a rich white high school. But I remember the middle school I went to before I moved to Southlake. I remember being in class and being in the same position as my students at on point.

Do people really have different intelligence levels? Are some people simply naturally smarter than others? The answer is yes, which makes me (unjustifiably) angry.

Because while that is true, the environment you grow up in also has a significant impact. Whether or not your parents encouraged you to study and work hard. Whether or not the people you were surrounded with held education at a high importance. Whether or not you felt that pursuing further education was something that was expected or even plausible.

ACKKKKK.

I thought I would not like middle schoolers as much as elementary schoolers, but I think I like them more. They’re really easy to talk to (I think it’s because we have the same maturity level) and you don’t realize how much of an influence you have. Those few precious hours in the classroom could change their lives, given that teachers choose to take that responsibility.

I need to remember to pray for them.