Earlier today, a kid that I’ll call Martin peeked into my office to say hello. When he left, I told my officemate how Martin and I started off on a horrible note and how things between us are far different today. Martin is one of my ESE clients this year. For the first several weeks, he refused to leave his gen ed classroom to work with me. He and I had butted heads in the first days of school. I had asked him a couple of times (politely) to come with me so that we could work together. He had refused and started talking back. I called home immediately and hoped that we could recover. The gen ed teacher pulled me aside the next day to explain that Martin’s dad had been murdered over the summer. As if the situation could be any worse, it turns out that Martin found his father’s body. She went on to say that he has a tendency to shut down if he is emotionally overwhelmed. I was shocked and heartbroken by the news. I tried coming around to him but he would not speak to me and would go as far as to crawl around the floor to get away from me. After a couple of weeks of this I decided to get Grandma into a meeting. She was able to mediate and we both decided to do a do-over and let things progress from that point onward. It was a slow process but over time I got to see that Martin is a kind and caring kid who wants to help others. I got to know him a little bit and he slowly opened up to me. Now that we are approaching the end of the year I can say that I will miss him as he moves to middle school.
Once Martin left my door today it dawned on me that Martin taught me some valuable things:
You never know what someone is going through
As I wrote about previously, kids’ lives can be full of chaos. When they come through the school doors, they are carrying all of that trauma and stress with them. Had I known Martin’s story I’d like to think that I would’ve addressed that situation much differently and not been so quick to judge. This idea can be applied to adults. When someone is acting in a way that you disapprove of it’s possible that they’re going through a really tough time. If we react with compassion instead of ego we may react in different ways.
Try to find forgiveness in your heart
It took a little bit of time but Martin was able to forgive me for how I had reacted towards him. Frankly, it’s taken me longer to forgive some of the kids who I feel have “wronged” me or the parents who have cursed me out over the phone. I wish that I had some interesting little insight to share that could help but I still have some more growing to do in this area.
Like the title of the post says, if you’re curious and willing you may discover that kids can teach the teacher.