The Right Place and Time

This week’s topic does not have to do with any particular incident, but rather a running theme that I have noticed the past few weeks. After students left one day, a cooperating teacher and I were chit-chatting and we ended up on a pretty emotional and deep subject. We wound up talking about the soft spot that we have for children who do not have the best home life, or consistent/present parents. She told me a touching story about a boy that the school staff gathered clothes for. She said they really worked to see that he was loved and supported at school - if not anywhere else.

She realized that while it is easy for people to think that students need teachers, teachers need certain students too. She said that this student taught her more in the handful of classes she spent with him than she was able to teach him. We talked about how people are placed in your life for a reason - always at the right place at the right time. I think it was very eye opening to see how students and teachers have such a mutual impact on one another, because that is not always something people put together. So whether things in your classroom, workplace, or life in general seem to be going wonderfully, terribly or somewhere in between - the people and things in your life are there for a reason… and it’s up to us to figure out why and learn from these experiences.