Greetings Dear Reader,
There are those times when we fail as teachers. We miss the need. We don’t use the right approach. We are too
tired or burdened to give our full attention.
Sometimes the failures see daunting and others times they are small. They always, however, stay with us.
I can recall a student who was on parole. He expressed the need to talk to me about
something very important. I was exhausted
and it was late on a Thursday night. It
would have been no big deal to dig a little deeper and summon the energy to
listen to his need. Instead I pushed the
conversation off until the next Monday when we had class with me again.
Over the weekend he violated his parole and went back to
prison for a long long time. He wrote me
a letter telling me why he had wished to talk to me. I do not think that the conversation would
have kept him from going back to jail. I
do think that he would have had an easier time of it had I made time for him.
We invest so much of ourselves into the lives of
students. No matter how many thousands
of students we help it is the ones we fail that we remember. Even as I write this the names of those who I
have let down in some way creep through my mind. I know that they are a small percentage of
those who have passed through my classroom but even one is too many for me.
As I walk away from this profession those few faces swim
before my mind’s eye. All I care about is
that they got what they needed from somewhere.
I pray for them when they come to mind.
I hope to encounter them and have an opportunity to be good to
them. As any teacher knows, they never
truly leave us.
Wishing you joy in the journey,
Aramis Thorn
Mat 13:52 So Jesus said to them, "That is why every writer
who has become a disciple of Christ’s rule of the universe is like a home
owner. He liberally hands out new and old things from his great treasure
store."
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