Monday, January 19, 2009

Heartbreaker

While Heartbreaker is a great Pat Benatar song, it doesn't really describe my weekend. Friday was my first day back at work after a very long break. I really missed my kids and was excited to get back (even though I had been battling a cold all week). Most of the afternoon was spent catching up with kids and learning how to do Speed Stacks. The kids had a Social that evening which always makes for an eventful night. It started with cleaning up one kid's leg (one of the girls "accidentally" scratched his leg with her shoe... long story but he ended up with a cut on his leg from a couple inches below his knee to a couple inches below his ankle). He's a tough kid so it wasn't a big deal to him, but it was a gnarly cut nonetheless. Later in the evening one of my middle school boys thought it would be a funny idea to pull a chair out as someone was sitting down... It would have been a funny idea if he didn't pick the one girl who just had surgery that removed a piece of her hip bone (they took the bone from her hip and put it in her mouth...). She was in so much pain and because of the very recent surgery (like a week and a half ago), I called the nurse... She ended up being ok, but really really sore. After the social, I went up to open the dorm and walked by one of my girls crying hysterically on another girl's shoulder. I gave the second girl the look of "Is she ok? What's going on?" and she gave me the "I'll tell you later." look. Apparently she just found out that her ex-boyfriend in Korea just died in a car accident. She was pretty devastated so Tami (the head of the girl's dorm) came in a chatted with her.

The rest of the weekend was full of fairly typical teenage drama, but what really broke my heart was a kid who doesn't even go to this school. Saturday morning I ran into Tami who was going to take an old student out for breakfast. He had been calling her the last few nights, crying hysterically because his parents don't love him. As she is telling me this, the kid pulls up in his Brand New BMW Bimmer that his parents gave him for getting a B average. A brand new car and all this kid wants is for his parents to love him... It broke my heart and continues to break my heart. I really do hope and pray that these kids feel loved; if not by their parents, then by their dorm parents at least.

2 comments:

Christine H. said...

Wow, a lot of stuff...sorry.

I'm sure the teens feel loved by you. Keep up the AWESOME work!

Ryan said...

:-(

It's crazy how much opening yourself up love students creates an opportunity to have your heart hurt...often.

I met with Mrs. Arce a little while ago. We hung out for about an hour talking about students who don't succeed. She still writes letters to students in jail who graduated over 10 years ago. I couldn't even fathom having your heart open to 1200 students a year. It gave me a new level of respect for educators though.