Compartments

The other day I was driving to work. I commute for 45 minutes or so. Typically I ride with Matt a few days per week, but on the day in question we had different schedules after school. I got on the freeway and almost instantly got into a traffic jam. I quickly texted Matt and suggested he choose a different route. While I was starting to grouse in my head about the horrible painful mind numbing slow pace we were traveling Matt texted back. He was going a different way as per my suggestion but had heard on the radio what had happened to cause the traffic jam. It's hard to continue to grouse, or huff or puff about driving somewhere slow when you find out a man got hit by a dump truck. A construction worker who was picking up those barrier barrels after the night's work on the road got ran into. He was listed in serious condition. I got to work not even that late and everything was fine... for me.

The traffic I am talking about was down by where I live, nowhere near where I teach. I didn't connect any dots at all when an email came from the counseling office asking for homework for a student (name withheld) whose father had been in an accident and was in the hospital. She didn't come to school the next couple of days.

I have to wonder if I am the only one who lives my love so compartmentalized. It will sound obvious to you that these two events are connected, but I didn't even think of making that connection at the time.

Two days ago, Friday, that same girl came to my room with her grandma, asking for homework for the next few days too. I had learned about the connection by now, and knew that her dad had died that morning.

I pulled up my Google calendar and let her know what had been covered and what would be next. But I stopped myself in the middle of explaining one of the assignments and said, "You know what, none of this is that important. Just take care of you." "If you need something to think about, go ahead and look over formulas and equations in Excel, but I'm gonna pretty much just give you an A when you get back."

I had a dad die of another student last year also. I've been teaching for five seconds and I've already had to develop a policy about what happens when your parent dies! It makes sense, I have hundreds of students at any given time, so of course, bad things are going to happen. I hope that I will not over compartmentalize my humanity. I hope that I can always say.. "You know what, just take care of you first."