"normal"

 I’ve always put myself in the category of growing up in a “normal” home.  I assumed my home life was normal and that most people had families and family relationships that were similar to mine.   Don’t get me wrong, I fully understood that some people had more material possessions than me and that probably even more people had less than I did, but I assumed that, for the most part, families were all like mine…loving and supportive. 

Maybe I’m naïve, but that’s what I had always believed.  

The last 15 years that I’ve spent as a teacher in public education have done nothing, if not proven to me that what I thought to be a normal home life is sadly A-typical. 

When you meet parents who don’t even know what grade their child is in, it becomes painfully clear why school isn’t a priority for their poor child. 

Or when you have a student who tells you their parent will “whoop” them if they get in trouble one more time, you begin to feel like a Boy Scout with a box of Band-aids who’s looking down the barrel of a gun.  

My first few years as a teacher, I would hear depressingly negative conversations in the teacher’s lounge and shake my head in disbelief.  Not disbelief in the things I was hearing about, I knew things like that were happening in the world, but rather disbelief in the fact that these teachers who I knew and admired were allowing themselves to have such a pessimistic view of life. 

Then came the day that I heard myself, out of frustration with an overly difficult situation, mutter the same kind of negativity that only a few years before had cause me to shake my head in shame.  I had gone over to the dark side. 

How had this happen?  Did I change, or had the scales simply fallen from my eyes and now I could see the world as it really is.  Negative. 

Maybe it’s wisdom, maybe it’s courage, maybe it’s age, but a few years have passed since I was violently forced into the real world, and I’ve learned how to see past the negative.  

Is it still there?  You bet it is.  However, for every student I have who’s home life is unbearable, I’ve got three or four who may be struggling educationally, or financially, but who have parents that are concerned and eager to do whatever they need to do to help their child succeed. 

I think the few tough cases take so much of my attention as an educator, that they seem bigger than life.  I’ve just got to work harder at focusing my attention on the positive…and life should be “normal” again.

 

Note:  This started off as a very different piece that it became. I was angry about a situation as school, but I couldn’t really write about that, so I was simply trying to vent.  Being forced to think through things as I was writing, my mood and perspective changed.    

Thanks for being my therapist.