"Ms. Arrasmith, have you ever been happy in your life?"

So since today the kids took FOREVER taking their reading test, I didn't end up teaching.  I did, however, have an interesting conversation with one of the students.

F. had come back from taking his math test since he hadn't been here yesterday.  (When we asked him where he was the previous day he said that his dad had thought last week was the last week of summer school.)  I was walking around checking on other students when I saw him looking off into space.  As I walked towards him, he turned to me and said, "Ms. Arrasmith...have you ever been happy in your life?"

Quite surprised, I said, "Yes, yes I have."  F. just kept looking at me, so I thought to myself, "Well I guess I'm going to have to give examples."  So I continued, "I've been happy when I'm with my family, with my friends, or when I do really well on a test."  His response was, "Have you ever been scared?"  I said, "Yes I have," and simultaneously wondered what in the world might come out of his mouth next and racked my brain to come up with a student-friendly and relevant example of being scared.

Instead, I turned it around and asked him, "Have you ever been scared?"  He replied casually, "Yes, I watched a scary show once."

Then I said, "Tell me what you're thinking about right now."  He went on to describe the scary television show he had seen.  So then I asked him if he had ever been happy before.  He said, "Ya, at my birthday party."  I asked him more about his birthday party and he told me all about it.  Then he started telling me all about how his older brother who is only a year older tells him that reading is important because he needs to get smarter.  (Yes!)  He also said that this brother "pranks" him at night so that he doesn't get to sleep very much.  He explained that pranking meant pouring water on his face.  Then F. went on to tell me about a show he had seen where a girl had a problem, that comes naturally, where she confused letters in words when she's reading.  I asked, "You mean dyslexia?"  "Ya, ya that was it."

I have spent a little bit of time wondering whether he was unsure if I have ever been happy or if he was trying to decide if he had ever been happy.  Now although I might be strict about students sitting in STAR (sitting up, tracking the speaker, asking questions, and raising hands), I'm pretty sure that I come off as a happy person, so I don't think that that was it.  F. seems like a perfectly happy person, so I don't know if this was the surface of something deeper or if it was simply a question from a ten-year-old boy.  Looking back I wish I had said something about the meaning of happiness and that being truly happy is not a fleeting emotion, but rather an attitude.  Next time.

Perhaps the best part of this conversation was the end where F. asked if he could bring family to the celebration time on Thursday (our last day of summer school).  He said that his brother really wants to come so that he can meet all of us teachers.  This pretty much melted my heart because it means that F. has talked about us to his brother, and that he has said good things about us!  Sometimes it gets hard to remember what this is all about amidst the lesson planning and making hundreds of copies late into the night, but moments like these always bring me back.  We haven't gotten the results of their post-assessments back yet, but this exchange today convinces me that we have been able to make a difference in the lives of these students, even if we were only with them for 4 weeks.

One student, J., the one who has improved the most this summer has his last day tomorrow.  He told us at the end of today, "I am going to Mexico at 5pm on Thursday."  Another student asked him, "Forever?"

It was funny, but also disheartening because it reminded me that this is the reality that my students face.  I'm sure that almost all of my students could tell stories of family members and friends being deported.  In fact, earlier this summer, one of our other students wrote in a writing assignment that he was going to Mexico and there was quite a confusion and some distress about whether he meant on vacation or forever.  In another classroom at our school, one student started crying when he heard that one of his peers was going to Mexico because he thought that he was leaving forever.  Many of our students have siblings that live in Central America.

I am glad to say that I can without a doubt tell F. that I have indeed been happy in my life.  Thanks to God for the abundant blessings in my life, and for all of the truly amazing people he has placed in my life to bring me such great joy.