Day 2,516 —Another Student Passed Away— (with Sunrise by the River Part 1 and 2)

What a crazy week it has already been, and it is only Wednesday. Yesterday in my 6th period, I was starting class and was about to ask a student to join the meeting that wasn’t there yet, but he was someone who usually comes to class. Someone in my in-person class said something and distracted me, I looked back and saw an email pop up. It was title, “Sadness . . .” It was the student I was just about to call that passed. This was not a car accident or some kind of illness. This was a death due to gun violence. He was fourteen.

That same class period I had someone observe me. I continued to teach. I read that students work he had submitted the class before; I didn’t say it was his but read it for me. It is just something I do now to keep their memories alive. If I have any work from them, I like to use them as examples.  

I was teaching Romeo and Juliet that day among other things, and it is becoming harder for me to sympathize for all the rich privilege people in the story who die because they cannot get along or be honest with each other when I see young kids die in my city all the time. Usually over something trivial and meaningless. And nobody is writing stories about them and no one is thinking back on them hundreds of years later, and I feel embarrassed that I feel the need to say this—but every life has meaning, not just the ones that are worth a lot of money to family or a corporation.

And I ran today too.