Reflections of a School Year

Back in September I wrote this post after a long a stressful first full week of school. Fast forward 10 months later, and here I sit writing a totally different kind of post on a June night, a couple of days away from the closing of another year. What a long way we all have come since that post. Me, my class, and that little girl who cried her eyes out for the first couple of months of the year. The little girl, I'm going to call her H, entered my classroom and my life on a rainy September day crying, not speaking a word of English. We struggled to communicate, but made it work somehow. One day she stopped crying, I don't remember exactly when, and another day we started having   back and forth discussions in English. It kind of seemed like it all happened out of nowhere, when in reality it was a months long, year long process, a lot of hard work was done by all involved.  We had our "graduation" on Monday and H left my classroom reading, writing, and one of my biggest class participators during discussions. She was proficient in language arts and math on our standardized test. Her parents thanked me for all of my hard work and I thanked them for theirs. I said goodbye to H and the rest of my students with genuine tears in my eyes.  It gets frustrating, this teaching thing, but it's stories like H's and many many other students in my sweet little class this year that keep me going and make me want to do it all over again in September. I wish my little Kinders good luck next year in 1st grade. They were like the little class that could...