Putting Out Brush Fires

To put your minds at ease: I saw Jake Friday and when I left, he seemed better. When I first arrived, he was so overwhelmed and unhappy that I wasn't sure what to say. However, after three hours of sometimes deep and sometimes goofy conversation, he was himself again; I was never so glad to hear someone make fun of my car in my life! I'm still worried about him, but I think he's gotten through another emotional crisis in his life, and I'm hoping that every hurdle he makes it over will help convince him that he can overcome all of his obstacles. By the time I left the park, I was emotionally drained- I wish someone had warned me that being an adult was going to be this damn hard!

I have a friend who is a school counselor. She is one of the people that I called when I was so desperate to help Jake. Her response to me was, "well, it sounds like you've done all you can, it's up to him now. If he's going to do it, then he's going to do it". I was stunned! this is a person who is trained to have compassion, and she basically told me there's nothing I can do. I know that she has had to distance herself from other people's problems to avoid being swamped with them, but WTF? How can you look at someone who is a product of their environment, and say, "tough break and good luck"? If that's what I'm supposed to do, I will never be a great teacher. I teach because I love my kids. They are so interesting and funny that even when I'm in a bad mood, I feel better being around them. I LOVE all of the creativity they put into trying to get out of homework! To me, THAT is a form of intelligence!

One of my students lost his grandmother last year. He comes from a large family, and I always felt like the grandma was the only one who noticed him. For two weeks afterward, he was missing assignments and he failed a quiz in my class. The other teachers just gave him an F and moved on. I couldn't do that. I asked him to stay after school, and we talked. He told me that he used to go to his grandma's after school, and she'd help him organize his homework and do it. So for a week, he came to my class after school and I showed him how to prioritize and helped him get started. After a little while, he was doing his work on his own again. My point being, if I had just let him "work it out", as our school counselor suggested, he would have failed my class, meaning he couldn't have passed 8th grade. Not only would he have lost someone he obviously loved, he would have felt like a failure, too. I am a teacher, and to me, that means not just teaching stuff written in a book, but also that every person deserves compassion and everyone has the potential to be successful. I realize that under the "No Child Left Behind" bullshit of the Bush Administration, humanity and compassion are not important, but I would rather lose my job because my students learned these lessons than keep it because they could memorize dates and theories.