Life Lessons

Sometimes what students need most cannot be found in a textbook or in a lesson plan. Today, my students didn't need a lesson in English, they wouldn't have been able to concentrate on analyzing a poem. Instead, what they needed most was just time to talk and to process the recent loss of one of their friends. I was surprised to hear about the recent death of a Form 4 student. I was terrified that if I brought it up in class my students wouldn't want to talk about it, or that I wouldn't know what to say to them, or that they would break down and I really wouldn't know what to do. When I asked the other teachers what they were saying to their students, they said that they weren't going to say anything, they were just going to go on with their lessons. Ignoring my student's loss and trying to teach an English lesson just didn't make any sense to me. So today, we spent time talking about how they were feeling as well as some healthy ways that they can process and deal with what has happened. I think that sometimes we separate school from real life, but there are times when the two meet and it then becomes more important to focus on life lessons rather than on textbook lessons.