Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Teaching

It’s been such a LONG time since I’ve sat down and written. My heart misses it. I just love writing. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s the reason I got my recent job. I talked up about how much I love teaching writing and feel like this new school needed someone who had experience working on a writing curriculum. Whatever may be it got me this new job. It’s hard to start over again at a new school. Feeling like the only person who doesn’t know how everything operates is a bit intimidating. On top of that, it’s a new staff of teachers who don’t know my story. But all in all, I am blessed to have a job again and things are going ok at the moment. I never really thought I’d end up working with low income-Title One students, but now my second year working in a low income school, I’ve come to realize the impact I can have on them. I’ve realized that these kids have such little support/if any at home. Today I ask a kid where his mom worked and he said Subway. She supports 3 kids on a Subway income. I asked another kid today if he had any brothers/sisters and he said that he was the only child. He said that his mom had other kids but that he thinks they died. He went on to tell me that she had an abortion but that he didn’t know what that meant. He asked me if I knew. I said yes, but told him that was something his mom would tell him when he got older. I went on to tell him that I was so glad that he was here and how lucky I was to have him in my classroom. I’ve become use to sending plastic bags of food home with kids every Friday so that their family has something to eat over the weekend. I’ve become use to students being taken out my class to have literally a dentist check up right outside my door. I’ve become use to kids asking me if we can take a field trip to somewhere via Google Earth because they have never seen outside of this area. And I’ve become use to these kids calling me mom mistakenly.
I don’t always enjoy my job. I haven’t always wanted to teach. I haven’t always felt called to teach. It’s tough and it takes everything out of me. But these kids make me look at my own life and feel so blessed at what I have.