The Family Life of My Students

I found out more information about my students' sad home life through random events. First one happened when I brought my beautiful wedding scrapbook that Susan made to school and showed it to my students. One kid raised his hand and said that his parents never got married. I don't know why he wanted to share that with the whole class. The other kids seemed surprised but didn't react verbally. Second information came about due to our field trip permission slips. One of the girls didn't have a work number for the slip so I asked her to put down her dad's cell phone number and she said that she didn't know his number because he just left the family without telling them anything. I had met with him for two parent teacher conferences this year and he had seemed pretty interested in his kids so I was surprised at this turn of events. She didn't seem sad about it though. I gathered the third information as I was monitoring the students for one of our activities and accidentally caught two students' conversation. We were writing a postcard from outer space to our parents and this boy asked if he could write to his mom and brother. Then the other boy at his table asked him where his father was and he told his friend that his mom and dad were not together anymore because his dad has another girlfriend. I knew that his father was not living with them because he was still in Mexico but I was surprised because his mom just gave birth to their second son two weeks ago.

So this is the kind of family life my students have. Yet they are able to come to school and learn, play, smile, joke around, and laugh. They are strong.