“At the end of the day, it comes back to the kids”
“Kids are so receptive, I think, to situations where you're like, (…) I'm doing my best, and you show them that. And they will be like, Huh, okay, he's trying his best.”
“Sometimes the cards are against you, but you you push forward anyway. And that's what I try to do. If if I have thirteen sticky notes on my desk, and a kid turns in something, and he asks, “When are you going to grade it?” I say, “I hear you. But look how many things I have to do.” I try not to to talk bad about the admin, but our workload is pretty heavy. We are given a lot of things to do and these are on my sticky notes. (…) It almost becomes again this opportunity to be realistic, to connect, to connect with the kids, to say, “Hey, guys, I’m having a rough day today.”
The Kids Care
“There was one time where (…) they were doing standardized testing. I was playing some noise, some sound in the background. Just white noise, basically. The admin came in. She sort of snapped at me, saying, “Turn that off!” and she left, and I was fine. But the kids turned around. ‘You okay, Mister?’ (…) That fills my heart with joy to see the students support the teachers in that way.”
Kids Taught Me to Laugh at Stressful Situations
“They taught me how to do that, to laugh at what goes wrong and just pick myself up, brush myself off and say, This is my reality. And at the end of the day it can be as frustrating as heck. But if the kids have made me smile, at least I got to smile at work that day and that's critical, and that's huge for me.”