Hive & Seek

after the events yesterday: another school SHOOTING, political assassination, unkind words, and reactions all over social media, and our own classroom practice for emergency situations (i hate that this is necessary now), it was just…..A lot.

despite my best effort not to watch television, and tune out social media. the awfulness still filtered in, and i didn’t get the best sleep. I was worried about my students and their reactions to the day’s events ironically happening on a day that we were practicing for such a situation. a situation that i do my best to prepare for, taking care to reassure students that we are safe, and i will always do my best to keep them safe. it was just….. too much.

The cherry on the sundae is that today is september 11th. a day that lives forever as a day of horror in the minds of those of us who were alive at the time. i usually have a thoughtful, THOUGHT-PROVOKING warm-up lesson on legacy that i teach on this day, but i just….. couldn’t.

So instead, i decided to keep our minds occupied on other things. we did a coloring WARM-UP. students colored for 15 minutes to get their heads in the right space to work. i allowed them to finish their target market people project (busy hands on activity). i asked them to write about something that they were happy to accomplish this week (positive reflection).

without going into details, I mentioned to my students that the schedule for the day had changed from what I originally posted because the craziness of the world had made me sad, and i felt that we just needed a day of creative learning and reflection.

it has been a long-standing (years and years) joke in my class that i hope to ONE DAY own a rolex watch. i often joke that Maybe a student will make it big and gift me with one when I’m sitting in my rocker at the RETIREMENT home? and today was that day!

no it isn’t a real rolex. it’s just a paper copy of one but it means as much to me as a real one on a day that started out as just….hard.

thanks to this student’s thoughtfulness, if i found myself feeling down, i would look down at my wrist and the paper rolex that they printed for me and feel okay about our future. with students like this one, how could it not be?