Perspective

The kids have been working on a fun project today, and I've been doing a lot of thinking (partly to avoid end-of-term grading... ugh). One of my co-workers has been talking this week about a situation going on at her husband's school. He is a teacher at one of the worst of the KCMO schools, where the gang activity has begun to affect the safety of the teachers as well as the students. Gang members have been stealing teachers' coats so that they can use the car keys to steal their cars. A female teacher was cornered and sexually assaulted by a group of gang members until another teacher came along in the nick of time. In an effort to "take back" the school, some of the staff have actually chosen to arm themselves at work today, and after a shooting at the funeral of a former student, they fully expect retribution to occur at the school this afternoon.

I've been emailing with A. about this all day, getting his point of view and comparing to the situations at his school. He tells me stories every day about the wacky things that happen at KCK's alternative high school, and we generally have a good laugh about it. His students get suspended for maliciously throwing cookies at each other, smoking pot in his classroom's bathroom, and other relatively entertaining offenses, but I still worry if I think too much about the metal detectors he walks through each morning. Thankfully, his school chooses to remove potentially violent students before violence can occur - if they didn't, I would be a nervous wreck all day every day. But it wasn't too long ago that the KCMO problems were in KCK as well. Those students (and those teachers) are blessed to have an intelligent principal who cares.

Then there's me, teaching "JoCo brats" to write. I've been feeling stressed lately, ready for break, and the last couple mornings have been particularly difficult where getting out of bed and making myself drive for 40 minutes has been concerned... but as I write all of this, my innocent little kiddos are dancing around my room to the Numa Numa song, decorating my fake (deciduous) tree for Christmas, and "cleaning" the room after a long day of puppet making. Despite the times I have to tell them not to wrap crepe paper around their heads, and ask them thirty times to stop talking and read a book, and constantly remind them to keep their hands to themselves... I am extraordinarily blessed.

Each bad morning this week has been turned into a good day by kids gluing fake Santa beards to their faces and asking me what I want for Christmas, re-creating Amelia Earhart's plane out of Legos, making up goofy songs about llamas, and shamelessly rocking out to Queen. There are no guns here, my students wish me no harm, and they wouldn't know what to do with my car keys if they found them. They don't know what pot even smells like yet, and if they're throwing cookies at each other, they're laughing about it (even if I'm not). I wish I could keep them like this forever.