As I am sitting here typing this, I have completed the education program and I have also completed the TTOC onboarding and subbed for three days. Before completing the education program and my 10-week practicum, my plan was to apply for contracts to hopefully move right into a position and start decorating and planning for my own classroom and students as soon as possible. This wave of thinking that I had completely changed and shifted during my 10-week practicum at Harwin Elementary. Although this ended up being an amazing experience with staff and students I will always miss, be grateful for, and never forget, it was also the hardest and most tragic thing I have ever done. Walking into the school for my first day on September 25th, I felt nervous but ready. I could never have imagined what would happen to me and the entire school staff and community three short weeks later. To walk into a staff meeting on the morning of October 13th just to learn that a 12 year old boy with good family, good friends, and an extremely bright future ahead of him had made the decision the night before to take his own life is something I will never be able to understand. This event rocked the entire staff and left us feeling traumatized, devastated, and in agony, despair, and disbelief. I felt like I was sleepwalking through my practicum and didn’t understand how I was going to wake up each morning and go back to that school. Just when I was feeling like my feet were planting firmly on the ground again, we were told that he did this because he was being extorted online- this made everything make sense but in the most horrific way possible-this never should have happened, but it did because he was a young, naive boy who didn’t know and someone took advantage of that for their own benefit without thinking about the consequences. All the feelings I had at the beginning came rushing back only this time there was a new emotion that stood out among the rest- an overwhelming amount of anger. I fell back into my sleepwalking routine for a few weeks, this time worse than the first, and didn’t know if I would be able to bring myself back to the present before the end of practicum. Fortunately, I did and I left with an overwhelming amount of love and appreciation for my students, my coaching teacher, and the staff, and a hope that my teaching journey would lead me back to Harwin for a contract in the near future. The events that I have experienced have left me feeling mentally, physically, and emotionally drained and because of this, I know I am not ready to invest my time, attention, and energy into developing relationships and lesson plans for a whole new group of students while my whole heart is still at Harwin with both the staff and the students. I decided to only apply as a TTOC to give myself the opportunity to gain more experience but also to have time during my Christmas break to step completely away from school, lesson planning, prep, and other education related things and to connect to family and friends and remember what matters and what is important. I will be applying for contracts that start in January or February when they come out, but I’m in no rush. I trust that everything happens for a reason and I am still excited to see where my journey in education will take me. Hopefully one day my journey will take me back to Harwin but I guess we will have to wait and see. To be continued…
