I spent a school day with a first year teacher/friend of mine in her secondary art classroom. She teaches in the penultimate economic middle class, with a few lows and a few more highs (hate those words as classifications, but they work for my purposes here.) The school primarily services, in fairly equal numbers, white, black, Hispanic and Punjabi students. Today most students were moderately attentive to getting their work done; typical adolescent diligence. Sounds kind of boring and uneventful, doesn’t it?
During the course of this one school day, Ms B stepped outside the classroom three individual times to attend to crying students. They all settled enough to return to their projects after a few minutes. She briefly shared their stories with me, and it wasn’t until I came home that I realized the sum of them.
The first girl was in tears because she is two months pregnant and had just made the decision to abort.
The second was in tears because her boyfriend just ended their two week relationship. Turns out she drinks at parties and he doesn’t like that.
The third was in tears because her lesbian girlfriend just ended their relationship of indeterminate length.
Boring and uneventful?
I have SO much to say about this, as any high school teacher worth their salt would. But my most immediate simple and apparent observations are such:
Our public rarely understands the events of a school day.
Standardized test scores are NOT important to these students. (Does that shock us?) Our children deserve to be treated as people rather than number-bubble-input.
And finally, our children absolutely deserve to be treated with respect as they tackle mature problems.
Kids are kids. I don’t doubt that children of 35 years ago had problems that were different yet the same- all equally catastrophic. I pray we remember, in the quest of higher math, science and reading scores, that we are also striving to raise resourceful, empathetic and responsible young people. They are our future and we as teachers are instrumental in creating the solid ground they are and will be traveling upon.
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