Friday, March 9, 2018

Slice of Life, Day 9-- "My Kids Don't Want Spring Break...What??"

I stood at the board by our class calendar explaining what Daylight Savings Time was to 23 Newcomers. Suddenly, someone noticed that I'd put a "No School" marker on the first day of our Spring Break, about a week or so away.

"Why no school, Miss?" a student called out.

"Oh, that's Spring Break! You get two weeks to do whatever you want! No school!!" My voice lifted in excitement. Who doesn't love a break?

The class buzzed.

"What?!"

"Why?"

"Can I come anyway?"

"I want come school! I come."

I literally had to stop and see if they were kidding. They were serious, completely serious. I was actually speechless. In 12 years of teaching, this was a first.

I've thought about this a lot today. I thought about it while I tried to explain what the tooth fairy was and they all died laughing. I thought about it as they ALL thanked me for their small bag of chips for meeting their Dojo point goal. I thought about it as a student showed me his connection to a book we read in class: his brother and sister died in his old country. And I thought about it when I gave hugs at the end of the day....squeezing them close to me.

And I've wondered...

I wonder if our little classroom community where it's okay to laugh about the American tooth fairy tradition and where you learn about that crazy thing called Daylight Savings Time and a thousand other things is actually a place they feel so much themselves that they'd skip Spring Break altogether. I wonder what we've done exactly to achieve it. I wonder how we got here. I wish I could bottle our special sauce and sell it.

BUT, I don't have the answers. I do know it's an honor to walk in that room every day and teach them to speak English, to love school,  to love themselves, and to value their differences. I'm not sure how I got so lucky.


2 comments:

  1. That’s so great. You have a real community in your classroom. You are lucky. But it is not just luck. I imagine you have worked and made deliberate choices to create that. Congrats on the results.

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  2. Amazing! Their enthusiasm is a gift to you, and you, clearly, are a gift to them to make them feel like your classroom is where they belong.

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