Wednesday, November 6, 2013

21 Days ... Day 6



Thinking of something positive today was especially hard. A month ago, I received a nasty email from an anonymous student who had hacked into his classmate's account. The email contained explicit words which were disgusting and hurtful. The school tried to find out who it was but they reached a dead end and there is no way forward unless they involved the police with a court order. It is considered sexual harassment and therefore criminal. 

All I wanted was for the student to be caught, to get answers and to take this as a teaching opportunity and guide him or her. If the student was not caught, s/he might do it again. But alas... nothing has happened since and despite the fact the Head was supportive and apologetic, I was left feeling shoved aside and that such an incident is no longer important. 

The guillotine of threats and life lessons should have come down on that particular grade. In my view, to get answered, the whole grade should have been gathered together and told it was a serious issue and that the school is thinking of calling the police in the hopes of fishing out the culprit who just needs guidance that this kind of act is unacceptable. 

Ironically, yesterday the whole grade was gathered to talk about little graffitis that have been written and sprayed on the walls around the campus and in the bathrooms. They were told that it was a serious matter and that it will not be taken lightly. So here I was standing listening to what was being said to these students and wondering if the value of my feelings as a person as well as being part of the school community was less than the value of the school walls.  

So what positive thing do I get from this? I am not sure... I keep struggling to get something out... 

Same day... but a little later....my son came home sad and he was acting strange,  being very uncooperative. I asked him if anything had happened at school. He said that during his PE lesson they had to pick a partner but his friend changed his mind last minute and went with someone else. So Jad felt left out and abandoned. We chatted a bit more and then I asked him if there was anything positive he could get out of this but he did not know WHAT WAS SO POSITIVE ABOUT THAT? He is only 8 so I did not pressure him into thinking. I thought if this is the beginning of a good lesson in life then I should demonstrate how we should do it. The two positives that I got out of HIS experience were; since he knows how it feels to be abandoned like that, that he would never do it to someone else and also the fact that he got to know the other student he had to partner with more. 

Now to get back to MY day.... What positive lesson should I get out of this? Any suggestions?

Reflection: 
Looking for positives every single day is not as easy as I thought. I am still struggling to find one positive about what had happened this morning. Sometimes one cannot think of a positive... cannot turn a negative into a positive... 

1 comment:

Birdie said...

Oh, Lana that is a hard one. Maybe the lesson here is life is not fair. Bad things happen to good people.