I debated all week about whether to post about the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. Part of me didn’t want to as if by not posting anything, I could imagine it not happening. But obviously that hasn’t worked, because it did happen, and it has been on my mind ever since. So I thought, “What could I post about it on my education blog? What could I write especially when I am at a loss for words? How could I express what my heart feels inside for the families and friends of the victims?" I could give statistics about mass school shootings and provide links to all the media that give plenty of details about it. I could write about all the things that as a country we might do to prevent it from happening again. But I don’t want to do that, because writing about those things would make me feel hopeless. I don’t want to feel hopeless. I don’t want to feel scared every day to come to work. So I decided to write about hope.
Hope for the future.
I am a teacher. Every day I come to work and I look into the faces of students that come from a variety of backgrounds. As they look back at me, I don’t know what kind of morning they had. I don’t know if they ate a good breakfast, or slept well overnight. I don’t know much about what happens outside of the school day (except what they tell me and sometimes that is more than I wish I knew). But what I do know is what happens when they are with me. So my hope for the future is that while they are with me, they feel good about life. That as they learn day by day about science and English, that they also learn about being nice and about helping others. My hope is that they believe that people are mostly GOOD. My hope is that THEY will want to be GOOD. My hope is that in spite of the bad that happens in the world, that they have HOPE. That we all do!
