Learning to Walk

Awkward – out of everything that you see on a day to day basis.. all of the dude high fives, the bestie hugs, the PDA from couples that pretend like this next 45 minute period might ACTUALLY kill them..awkward is the best way to describe it. It isn’t bad though. Far from it in fact. It’s growth. It is the shakiness when we first begin to walk. It is the first long step you take before you get on an escalator. 

But like our first steps, as scary as they might be, they are necessary.

 In high school, you see them everywhere. Just like a parent watching and encouraging a new born, as a teacher, you get to witness and celebrate with your students all the same. Sometimes it is a quick first step.. like watching a brilliant, creative, and extraordinarily shy sophomore get up in front of 30 classmates and speak on a topic that he hopes to god everyone else enjoys as much as he does and…Sometimes…well, sometimes they are more like the escalator.

That is the case with Kay- a small, bright, hispanic girl, that has seemed to have to been pushed off to the side a few too many times. When I first met her, first semester, I knew two things about her. I knew she lived in the government assisted housing which is in walking distance of our school and I knew she spent half the day here and half the day at our districts alternative school ( that is where the “bad” kids go)

Kay was in my keyboarding class. If you take a second to think about what a keyboarding class looks like.. you’re probably spot on. Other than the brief interaction you get with the students as they walk in, most of the time is spend monitoring students working on a typing software. (That has since changed due almost exclusively to the following interaction.) 

I was walking around, giving half-hearted support to students that looked like zombies glued to a bright screen in a dimly lit room. As I walked by Kay I noticed she wasn’t doing anything. I had noticed this before but, I thought to myself as many people do, “this is just how she is.” Not today. Today I stopped. Today I was going to be tough. And as I started to ask her why she wasn’t working, she popped her head up, looked me right in my eye and said ..

 “ why are you talking to me, you don’t ever talk to me.”

I was crushed. Beyond crushed. Devastated I guess.  It was an honest statement. I didn’t talk to her. Ever. For the first time as a teacher I felt like I didn’t deserve to be there. As teachers we always hear the phrase “establish teacher student relationships” You hear it so much in fact that it has all but lost its way in a long list of phrases and initiatives that get tossed after the next education changing idea arrives at our door steps.

I came to realize however,  that’s all she wanted.. to feel like her presence mattered. 

To feel like she wasn’t passed over.. again. All she wanted was someone to ask how HER day was going and genuinely care about the response.

She doesn’t know it, and I probably won’t ever tell her.. but that long step I was talking about has been my own .........and that interaction changed me.