My Students

This week was a really bad week. This blog is more for me to remember months from now than it is for you to read. But read anyway...
These past few weeks I have encountered the most disrespect I have ever experienced from my students. I'm really struggling to have compassion for them. Their culture is so lost, and sometimes it just frustrates me that they cannot see that constant drug use, gangs, carrying guns around, and having babies at 14 is not healthy for them emotionally or physically! (And of course, not at all spiritually!) But I graded their essays about fear and/or a journey and here are a few of topics they wrote...puts things in perspective:

When my sister and her girlfriend were killed by a drunk driver
When my dad died of lung cancer last year
I used to watch my stepdad hit my mother and I do not want to be like that to my own baby (that she is currently pregnant with)
I am trying to be a responsible teenage mother (more than one of these essays)
Being chased by the police when I had drugs (he did not get caught)
When a friend was almost shot at a party
When my father abused my mother (both who were drug addicts)
Finding my fathers gun for the first time
Taking ecstasy for the first time feeling I might die
Going to jail for theft
Stealing car radios and getting shot at and chased
Getting evicted from our home with no where to go
Running away with a friend who then wanted to use me for sex and then sleeping on the streets instead until I was so scared I went home