Weekly Reflection: Not all kids…

Not all kids like hearing the last bell of the day.

Not all kids have food in the pantry when they go home from school.

Not all kids are safe in their homes.

Not all kids know where they will sleep that night.

We don’t like to talk about the lives of kids who come from the other “New Zealand.”

I teach in what is considered, by government measurements, to be a wealthy area. However there are kids in my class I worry about when I send them home at the end of the day. They are the ones I give a few dollars to for a sausage at sausage sizzle and the ones who often arrive very early at school and hang around the ground after the bell goes.

One child, who arrived in my class this year, already viewed school as a negative place, somewhere to run away from at 11 years old.

Violence at home and meant that normal school confrontations over who gets to go first in PE or who gets sits where on the bench at lunch were solved with fists, not talking.

It’s been a term but slowly we’ve been making progress.

I’m lucky that my older boys, although boisterous, aren’t violent at all. In fact those boys were on a secret mission to teach the student to not immediately to lash out confrontations. I’m also very lucky that I have another student in class who  has a shared obsession with engines and has access to tools and a small piece of machinery.

This Friday as part of passion project hour this student  had the time of his life taking apart a weed blower engine out the back of my classroom.  The goal of this endeavour being to put it back together again once they are done and hopefully write an iBook on how engines work. Yes I want this student to do well academically but the broader goal is to keep this student engaged and, dare I say it, enjoying school before we can work on all that over stuff.

But I can’t help but worry next week is the final week of school.

And not all kids look forward to the holidays.