Lifting up our children:

I am a third-year teacher.  Being such, I am very aware of the place where a lot of teachers are, in the United States.  There are many teachers that are wanting to quit their jobs.  There have even been teacher strikes in the state of Minnesota.  This is not just one school or one teacher, but a whole movement of teachers that are exhausted and angry that are choosing to leave the profession.  I have personally known some teachers that have had breakdowns and have been close to quitting.  I have even been very close.  This past week, especially,  has really shown me the great highs and lows of teaching.  

As hard as it is to understand and as much as I don’t always like it, I am only in charge of myself.  I just had a very hard week where I watched some students make some pretty bad choices, even after constant warnings that they need to watch what they are doing.  I preach that choices have consequences, but they did not listen to me or the other teachers.  I don’t want them to be punished, yet, here we are.  They made choices and now many of them are reaping the consequences.  

I have learned more and more that I need to depend on the Lord.  A great example of this is Lamentations 2:19, “Arise, cry out in the night, as the watches of the night begin; pour out your heart like water in the presence of the Lord.  Lift up your hands to him for the lives of your children, who faint from hunger at every street corner.”  I love this verse because it talks about lifting up children to the Lord.  I know that I am not actually a mother, but I look at the kids I teach like they are my own.  I can’t be in control of all the choices they make or whatever happens to them, but I can care about them, and I can certainly give my concerns to the Lord.

The thing I realized though was that I can not fix anyone.  I can try my best to give advice and I can try my best to give some thoughts, but at the same time, I can not fix anyone.  There is only God that can do any of those fixings.  One thing that I have learned is it is important to listen.  This is not the time for the “I told you so’s.”  It is a good reminder that everyone makes mistakes.  We have all been in a place that has made a big mistake.  My job is to help be there for the students.  Then lastly, I do try to do this for devotionals.  But I try to pray over my students, two every day.  I want to lift them up to the Lord because I know he is really the only one who can use their lives to the best of his ability.  

However, I do really love my job.  There are moments when it is harder to absolutely love it, but for the most part, I love getting to be a teacher and do what I do every day. Recently, even though it has been a few hard weeks at work, I have had some pretty memorable moments that I want to share with you all.  This is a good reminder for me to hold moments like these tight when the other moments are harder and seem to arise more regularly. 

The first one is our celebration for our high schoolers.  The school where I teach does a celebration for the high school students after they reached 1000 golden tickets (a golden ticket is awarded from a teacher to students for good behavior).  Our celebration then was to go roller skating.  I didn’t know how this would go.  I didn’t know if the kids would really have fun or would be whiney.  (I do work with high schoolers, after all.)  However, they had a great attitude, and it was a joyful experience to watch these kids be kids for a while.  Sometimes my students are very much caught up in the social drama, family trauma, and stress from school that they forget to get off their phones, laugh, and enjoy themselves and others.  At the roller skating party, they did just that. 

Another great moment is getting my Spanish II students ready to teach their first elementary lessons.  I love when my students go to the elementary school to teach those students Spanish and what they have been learning.  It has been wonderful to see my students taking it so seriously.  There was even one student who quoted, “It is so great that we are going to be spreading our Spanish knowledge with the younger kids.”  I love getting them the experience of being leaders.  Many of them will realize from these lessons that they may have a passion to work with the youth and lead others in a lesson and activity.  

Then the last one is my absolute favorite.  Every year, I want to give the Spanish IV students a chance to ask me any questions that they have about college.  I have my three Spanish IV student girls.  I gave them some money to go to the gas station to buy some breakfast for all of us.  Then they were allowed to write down any questions that they had about college and life after high school. This ended up being a great discussion! I was so happy that the students really had some good questions and really wanted to know what to expect.  This is a good reminder that in my job as a teacher, I have a bigger role to play than just being able to teach them the basic Spanish concepts.  Yes, I have that role too, but I also am supposed to be there for them and to teach them to succeed after high school.  

I have been blessed with a pretty great opportunity to teach the youth.  I get to be there for the hard moments, including them learning hard life lessons, as well as for the pure joyful moments like roller skating.  Then I also get to be there to help lead them to their next steps.  The best part, though, is that I am the vine of the Lord’s work.  The Lord is the one who is working in the kids’ lives, and I just get to be a part of it.