Love, Love, Love...Love is All You Need

Too bad this isn't the typical mushy, gushy Valentine's Day post, because that would be fantastically cliche. Or the typical anti-Valentine's Day, I'm-wearing-black-all-day post, because that would be equally predictable. Or any Valentine's Day post at all. It just so happened that the events of my week lent themselves well to the theme of the weekend.

I both had the first student in a current class get expelled and learned of the first student from a former class having been expelled this week. It is devastating in a way - more so for the second than the first, who I have only been with for a little over a week and hadn't built much of a relationship with, yet. Although, I also must admit that everyone saw it coming with the second student. He was on a crash-course in that direction, heading fast.

He must have been a kid doomed to end up in an alternative school. I mean, all the teachers he's ever had say things like, "He's worthless. He might be an okay person, but he's a terrible student." and "He belonged in the principal's office; not in my class." About the sixth grader, the comments were milder; after all, he really is still a kid. "It happens sometimes" and "We can't help them all."

I just don't think I can agree. Maybe I'm still fresh, green, and starry-eyed, not yet disappointed and jaded by the world of teaching. The fact remains, I hold myself to a higher standard when it comes to relating to my students. When they mess up, I have a role to play and it's not to kick my feet up, throw up the defenses, and say, "I did what I could; he was on his way there." While those facts might be entirely true, I am still his teacher.

In dealing with these two students this week, I discovered that I still love kids who mess up. I have to. I can't save them, but I can still love them, smile, and tell them goodbye with kind words as they walk in to pick up their personal belongings, to be escorted out by a resource officer. I can strike up a conversation, try to offer some advice, and call my teacher-friend who works at the alternative school to have her watch out for him.

I don't have to be defensive, because it was their choice to break the rules. I don't have to write them off, because it was not my responsibility to save them. It is my job to love them - when they're good, bad, right, wrong, behavioral dreams, troublemakers, enrolled, or expelled.

Now talk to me in five years and it will probably be a different story and I'll have a much harder time saying these things...