Reading Reflection 2

This section of the book is entitled, and rightly so, “Challenges”. After the first section, I did not know what to make of the next section until the third sentence. I realized that this portion would not be “pretty”. It was the reality of what teachers face, the brutality behind the “realness” of their lives in and outside their classroom. One of my favorite lines that made me contemplate the actual “job” of being a teacher states, “What no one told you was that you’d be overwhelmed with stress, have an unmanageable workload, and have no option but to break up even the worst of fights wearing pantyhose and your good pair of heels.” (pg. 45) Students come into the classroom with “baggage” carrying with them homelessness, pregnancy, poverty, gangs, deaths, drugs, and other issues that plague the children of today’s society. Teachers do not just have one job, they have many. Teaching is really a job, within a job, within a job, within a job. You are expected to be everything at once, all while still staying true to you, earning less than almost every other profession in the world, even though we should make the most simply because no other profession would exist without a teacher first beginning the knowledge.

With all of the challenges that kids face these days the struggle becomes not what you will encounter but how to handle it when you finally do. How do you assist a student, get students help, and continue the help long after they are in your class and in your school? The answer is found within a simple material object, a mirror. Students don’t need a superhero, they just need someone who is willing to care more than the rest of the people in their lives, who obviously haven’t or can’t. Being able to relate to your students is the first step in the right direction. Reassuring them that you are someone they can turn too, you are more than a teacher, you’re a human being, someone who has all too well experienced hardships of your own and overcame them in order to pursue being a teacher. (pg. 63) The other issue is change, the students and other people involved in the particular situation or issue have to be willing to make a change, without this “will”, students cannot step forward. But as the teacher, learning when to speak up and when not to speak is a continual problem, something that I know I will struggle with and be forced to face many a times. (pg. 60)

Change as an important part of helping students help themselves, is something that must “begin from within”. (pg. 69) Helping a student to find a path, find a reason for surviving daily life, and find their voice all starts here. But more than teenage problems and those issues of society are the issues of the country, of the world that affect not just the school and the classroom, but the students directly. Learning how to deal with this concern lets students know they are not alone. At the end of the day, what does a student really want? Do they want that A on the test, to be popular in school, to have new clothes or food on the table, to have a safe place to life or a place at all, well maybe, but most of all what these students need is someone to stand there and be willing to say, against everything they have done or not done, said or not said, that you are still there, loving them. “As teachers, we have to know each one of our students, so that we can reach them in order to teach them. I encourage us to be that teacher who cares for those who are labeled ‘lost’ and for the students called ‘unteachable,’ because the only thing kids really want is love.” (pg. 88)