I spent the entire drive to work yesterday morning complaining about the group of students that has frustrated me so much. My friend commiserated with me because he knows them well and had a similar experience with them. It's a lovely little metaphor about repeating the same mistakes because you don't learn from the lessons that bash you in the head.
When I arrived at work, all faculty members were called into a meeting. In a school, this is never a good sign. This means that something bad happened during night...something bad enough that the administration is willing to leave every student in the school completely unsupervised. It means someone died.
Sure enough, four of our students were in an accident the night before. Three died instantly; one crawled out and was in intensive care. The surviving student sits in one of my classes. One of dead was in my class last year. I knew the other two. I've been through far too many students deaths, but this was the first that personally affected me. It sucked.
The school cancelled the performances because the junior and senior classes were completely shell-shocked. On top of that, the junior theme was zombies, and it just didn't seem appropriate to talk about the living dead in the wake of the experience.
So, I spent the day with classes of students who just stared at their desks in complete silence. Each of the students from last year's 7th period stopped by to see me. Each student who talked to me grabbed me and sobbed into my shoulder. I cried with each one. By the end of the day, I was completely drained. It took every ounce of my energy to drive home and climb on the sofa.
And I slept.
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