By Nate Reaven

I do not know what to do about this.

This past weekend one of my students was shot through the chest. Apparently, a family friend turned enemy entered into my student’s house at 2:00 am, killed the father, and shot my student, who is currently in the hospital but should be physically okay within a couple of weeks.

What do I say? How do I react?

How do I change? What do I change?  Do I change?

We passed out notes to our class and had them write a get-better soon note to the student. His friends and favorite teachers went to visit him at the hospital and saw that he was in high spirits. What do I say? Sorry? Is that enough to make it better? Is that ever enough?

How do I act? Like nothing happened? “Move along class, there is nothing to see here. Please turn to page 218 in your books.”

Is this just something that happens? Should I have expected something different?

How do I change? Do I teach differently now? Do I let up, let them slide a little bit more, let them get away with talking out of turn? Or, should my class become stricter, teach them discipline instead of grammar, life skills in place of quality of living?

What do I change? Do I change the way I teach? Change the way I interact with my students? My mother said something interesting to me. She said the teachers that make it into the movies are not the ones teaching grammar every morning. They are the teachers who make the classroom a place of social well-being, a place of comfort –first. The teachers that focus on creating self-confidence as the learning target. The movie teachers are those teachers that consider the the academic goals, not secondary, but certainly second priority. How much do those movie-teachers actually teach? Do their students walk away from their classrooms more intelligent, more confident or both? Do those students get shot at 2:00 am in the morning?

Do I change? I had nothing to do with what happened, and there is nothing I could have done to prevent what happened. Maybe I should not feel any sense of obligation at all. On the other hand, the reason I got into teaching was to make a difference.  What kind of difference?

I do not know what to do about this.

by Janessa Jordan

Technically, I have been working on this blog since Wednesday. Wednesday was the first day that I was really overwhelmingly frustrated in the classroom. My students were yelling, disengaged, and disrespectful. I had collected homework which demonstrated my students’ lack of understanding and lack of general will to work hard.

In my frustration, I wrote a post that was full of hopelessness. It called out the education system that breeds disengagement and a lack of hope in my students. By not providing the necessary time, resources, and manpower that my students need in order to really learn, my students have learned how to skate by and how their voices don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.

Those thoughts saddened me so. I have always been such a dreamer–hopeful about the positive change that I can make in my students’ lives. Yet, for the first time I was allowing my frustrations about the system and my own teaching abilities to smother the hope that I’d built up for all of the years that I’ve been longing to be a teacher.

Then, as I was finishing planning my unit on the Kite Runner, I stumbled upon this poem by Rumi:

Who are we in this complicated world?

if we come to sleep
we are His drowsy ones.

and if we come to wake
we are in His hands.

if we come to weeping,
we are His cloud full of raindrops.

and if we come to laughing,
we are His lightning in that moment.

if we come to anger and battle,
it is the reflection of His wrath.

and if we come to peace and pardon,
it is the reflection of His love.

who are we in this complicated world?

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I was so humbled by this poem. I get to choose how to cope with my students’ lack of motivation, my students’ far-below-grade-level abilities, and the education system’s ongoing barrage of legislation which seems to penalize teachers and kill creativity in students (see http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html) . Regardless of what circumstances I have been given, I can still choose how to react. However I choose to respond, my heart ultimately carries momentum in the world, beyond myself and my own classroom, and into a school and a system that desperately deserves positivity and hope.

Here’s to Monday: A brand new day in a brand new week with a brand new attitude. In this complicated world, I choose to “come to peace and pardon.”