I'm not sure why, but about six weeks ago, I started loving my job. No more cowering under the covers when the alarm went off, no more resentment over grading papers on the weekends while normal people go for a run or head to the movies, and no more dread-parading-as-nausea on Sunday afternoons.
I think it has to do with this: I started loving my kids. Like the way Luis dribbles his basketball into my Reading class, or how Laura's favorite conversation starter is, "I don't have to read today, do I, miss?" Instead of gritting my teeth and forcing myself to by sweet, I started seeing the sweetness in that bouncing basketball and fear of reading.
One of the reasons I love my kids has to do with the things they write. Josh, in as stylistic and succinct a manner as I've ever seen, explained that living in a ghetto does not make one a ghetto person. Vanessa used perfect parallelism to convey the awfulness of racial judgement. Day after day, with little to go on other than the instinct that I'm trustworthy, my beautiful students bend their dark heads over their journals and tell me the truth.
This trust they're doling out to me ... it's becoming more evident every day. They listen when I babble (and lord-a-mercy, can this woman babble), they are patient when I fall behind on grading or when my lesson is a snoozer, and they laugh at my poor attempts to speak Spanish.
They used to ignore me, just as I used to grit my teeth to be nice. We're moving closer to each other, now, and my surprise and relief is as monumental as this city.
I think they can tell that I love them.
And what problem has love ever failed to solve?
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