The Secrets of Her Students’ Lives

Pay MORE attention to the children in your lives!!! From Yahoo!.com…

When Elle Deal decided to try a new exercise with her fifth grade students, the Friday activity turned into something incredibly heartbreaking.

The elementary school teacher asked her kids to write a short blurb, titled, “I wish my teacher would know . . . ” and their answers left a major impact on her. Elle shared a few of the heartbreaking (and anonymous) statements on Facebook as a reminder to everyone to “leave this life a little better than how we found it.”

“Kid 1: I wish my teacher would know, my dad is in jail and I haven’t seen him in years. Kid 2: I wish my teacher would know, I don’t always eat dinner because my mom works and I don’t know how to work the stove. Kid 3: I wish my teacher would know, my sister sleeps in the same bed as me and sometimes she wets the bed and that’s why I smell funny. Kid 4: I wish my teacher would know that I don’t always have sneakers for gym class because my brothers and I share one pair. Kid 5: I wish my teacher would know I like coming to school because it’s quiet here, not like my house with all the yelling.”

This simple activity reinforced Elle’s desire to spend her life hopefully making a difference for others. “We spend so much time talking and judging what we think we know . . . we need to ask more questions and spend more time listening,” she wrote. “We also need to shift our mindset and see things from other people’s perspective, give more than we get, and live to serve.”

So, this just shows, HOW much may be happening to a kid in her/his time away from school, because until you get to the higher grade years (in the higher grades of middle school and high school), most of your times are spent at home, and, if you don’t have a safe home, for whatever reasons there may be (parents arguing about their divorce, family getting broken up for whatever reasons, deaths in the family, etc., etc., etc.), and the kids have NO alternative outlets to express their feelings like this instructor gave her students the opportunities to, things will start to escalate, and, eventually, everything will topple down, and, the child will suffer because of it.

Gladly though, this instructor did this exercise, and she’d gotten a closer look into her students’ life away from school, and, hopefully, she can find ways, to help her students find an effective outlet for the stressors occurring in their separate homes.