Treat Her Well

No more than eleven days ago, on a grey September morning, I watched as my daughter Julia boarded the school bus to embark upon her first day of kindergarten.  I cried quietly while her bus grew small in the distance and prayed that she be met with kindness as she began to navigate the world without me.  And I'm certain that I wasn't alone in my request.  Undoubtedly, parents all over the world were whispering a similar prayer at roughly the same moment, on behalf of their own child.

Since that morning, my role as a second grade teacher has changed.  I have begun to view my students from a slightly different vantage point, seeing inside each of them, a little part of my own daughter.  The words I use and the actions that I employ in my classroom seem more important now, now that I have a child who is on the receiving end of another teacher's words and actions.
Teaching is challenging.  We have good days and we have bad days.  Teachers are human and therefore they are also imperfect.  There are times when our patience has been pushed to the breaking point and the words that we use or the actions that we employ do not represent our best selves.  Yet even on the toughest of days, I urge you, my colleagues, to treat our children well.  This request does not come from a selfish place, considering that now I have something to gain, but rather from a place of new found awareness.  You see, we meet our students on the first day of school.  What we haven't met or what we don't see are the trails of memories that have led them to us.  We don't see the hardships or even the triumphs that our students have endured on the way to our classrooms.  But we must.  We must choose our words wisely and employ our actions kindly.  We must have high expectations of our students and push them to reach their full potential.  Yet we must do so in such a way that they feel safe, respected, and important.  We must always remember that while, to us, they are our students, to their parents they are the most important miracle.

Below is a link to a poem written by Dan Valentine that ties in nicely with this blog post.

I Trust You'll Treat Her Well

Here, you will find a link to an Animoto I made for this blog post.