getting used to this

i miss the students in The Third School. The ones i got along with. Even the ones i never quite knew but have a sneaking suspicion i would get along with if given the chance -- like the boy i met once skulking around in the underground carpark because he was looking for the school cat, the group of kids i saw launching their model plane near the back gate (and who told me that they weren't doing it on the school field because of the breeze there), the lower sec kids i found sitting on top of their lockers outside their classroom (studying, of course, what else could they have been doing?).
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Maybe this is a Sign that i should work towards coming back and teaching fulltime there. Working as a part-time teacher is an odd thing, and not quite what i want to do for the rest of my life. At least, not now that i have found these students, and, for the first time in my career, actually want to get involved in their lives and play a role in their growing-up years.
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In the meantime, maybe i should stop reading my former colleagues' FB posts.
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Or maybe not.
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for good

i think a few of my encounters with my students at The Third School will haunt me for years ......
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i wonder what will become of them, years down the road? If the things i said to them made any difference at all, and if so, what kind of difference? If we will ever meet again? Clearly, my encounters with them have changed me -- they have made a difference in my life. (A positive difference, i believe ... )

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a place just right (2)

i must say though -- if i had this last half-year to live all over again, i'd do some things differently. A few students came to me with genuinely good questions over the course of the semester -- good questions to do with their academic studies as well as Life more generally -- and i did the best i could given who and what i was at the time. But now, looking back, i know that there were better ways to deal. i only hope i didn't do any damage with what i did tell them, and i hope that they got something out of it nonetheless. i guess that's all in God's hands now.
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a place just right

Looking back over the past half-year, i've slowly realised exactly how much of myself i'd invested in the teaching, for possibly the first time in my teaching career. How much of my emotional and mental energy has gone into thinking about my students, thinking about how to help them reach the potential i can so clearly see in almost all of them. And it's mostly not even about academics.
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i didn't use to understand how my colleagues in other schools could find their students so endlessly fascinating that they'd go on and on talking about them all the time. Now, i do understand. Funny the difference meeting the right people and finding the right fit can make.
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And now to learn to let go. 
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