Back in the saddle again

It has been a while since I wrote… and maybe I need to explain by just saying that this was the hardest year of teaching yet. And I am firm believer that if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all… so I have not said anything for a while…
But now it is summer vacation and I am ready to start writing again, because graduation and a few weeks of vacation reminded me why I am a teacher. I thought that I would write my first entry back in the blogging world about a student I wrote about earlier in the year. He was expelled for which I won’t go into detail, but it broke my heart. That was only the second time that I have ever let my kids see me cry (the other being when a close friend died). I was devastated, because I felt like I had failed as a teacher and mentor.
And then the next day came and I had to take what I had learned from the loss of that student and apply it to the kids that I was left with. But for the rest of the year I hoped that he would not give up, and I hoped that I would see him again. But in my line of work, we don’t often see the kids that we lose again. And for that reason you cannot imagine what it meant when I saw him walk into the graduation stadium in his gown. (Our school is so small that we combine with adult ed for graduation, which is where he went after his expulsion.) My heart stopped for a second, I was so proud of him.
There are no words really for that feeling. It was like someone gave me back something priceless that I thought had been lost. And for all the hardship of this past year, that one kid reminded me why I do what I do. There are a lot of kids that walked that day that reminded me, that no matter how hard it is, they deserve to have someone fight for them. Even if it is just fighting to help find them a place to do community service;)