Recess Walk

Until the weather gets freezing, I'm actually enjoying recess duty. I usually take over Homework Detention, which means helping a lot of kids who don't do their homework at home (and often have a hard time completing it on their own). I don't mind it. Some of these kids are getting attention that they crave, or getting one-on-one reteaching that they might not get otherwise. Meanwhile, I miss out on lots of tattling and help out the grade level teachers. Win-win!

Unfortunately, I started Homework Monitoring just after promising one of the little ones that we'd go for a walk and talk one day. He kept asking me, "When are we going to go on our walk?" And when I said, "I don't know- I'll try today!" he'd respond, "You keep saying that." I felt awful, but I promised him that I'd find a day to make it work.

Today I was finally able to go on a walk with him, and I asked him about his weekend.

"Did you see the building that went down on TV?" he asked. I assumed he was talking about the local bar that burned to the ground a few days ago.

"Oh, the one with the fire?"

"No, the one the plane went into. I felt really sad for that lady," he told me somberly, with genuine sympathy on his face.

Apparently at some point this weekend, he saw a 9/11 memorial on television, heard a woman tell her story, and didn't realize that the whole event actually happened 9 years ago.

I was a little taken aback, but also touched. I don't think he realized that this had been such a huge national event, especially because we live far from the area in which it happened, and he wasn't even alive when the planes hit- and yet I could tell that he was really affected nonetheless by seeing it.

I wouldn't have expected a seven year old  to understand the gravity of 9/11, but he certainly seemed to. I'm glad I made time for that walk today.