Archive for December 12th, 2008

As I survey the class full of 5th graders, I realize that “this is where it begins.” This is where the kids begin to academically thrive or barely survive. At Pre-K, where I was working yesterday, it’s just learning to follow instructions, coloring things, singing songs, that stuff. You’re a student, you have a bad year in Pre-K, you can recover. But in 5th grade, you begin to develop skills you’ll need, or not develop them.

There are so many distractions that keep them from thinking about school. I’ve seen kids come in and I just sensed that they had had a run in with a parent, God only knows of what type. A girl showed up this morning, wearing a pretty pink sweater, in tears. How should I respond? She won’t be able to pay much attention, I sense, if she’s seething over some hurt. It could be she feels bad a lot. Many students in our district have difficult home situations.

But then, she’s at school now. When you come to work in the school you begin to see that it is a fully functioning life-pod, with places to feed people, rest, exercise, and do everything but sleep. It should be possible to make the school a separate place with a separate peace. For years, the schools have sought to fight the “overwhelmed student and parent” problem by setting the school in opposition to the outside world and make it a hermetically sealed off “safe place.”The most widely discussed part of the effort has been free school lunch and breakfast.

So today, in the modern school, we have resources to help people. But I am still concerned about how much impact this help is going to have on the indiividual student unless someone relates to that student — this would generally be the teacher — on a personal level so that the student feels like they are part of a community. This is part of my goal as a teacher: to teach them that individuals are important. Call me an idealist.

So I ask the girl with the pink sweater if she is okay. Does she need to go to the nurse? Does she want to sit down to the side and rest? She calms down, says no, she’s okay, and goes to her desk. There’s no way, as a sub, to know if this method of “identify and address” student emotional concerns is working over the long run. But I feel it’s important, human to human, to at least show concern and recognition of kids’ feelings.