One of my favorite quotes from Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog is when Penny tells Buddy, "Everything happens..."
"Don't say for a reason," Billy interrupts her.
"No. Everything happens," Penny clarifies.
And sooner or later everything does happen. Everything good, and everything bad. Today, good things happened. My wedding day started showing up on the long range weather forecast. I picked up my wedding dress. Today, bad things happened. I woke up with a sore throat. I had to make cider using a longer process than usual.
But most importantly, today I lost my first student.
I've been teaching for six years now, and have taught around 1200 students between the ages of 12-15. My first 350 students have graduated from high school (or not, depending on the student). Some of them are probably scattered across the globe at college, or on missions, or working, or in jail, or wherever they are headed. Some are probably already married. A few are probably parents. Working with the flood of humanity that I do, sooner or later, everything happens.
But the inevitability of losing a student doesn't matter at all when you find out which one it is you've lost. When I checked the news this morning and found out that they had identified the body of a 14-year-old drowned in Hyrum reservoir as one of my students from the past two years, I sat crying in the kitchen for a long while. A month and a half ago, I was saying hi to this kid in the halls and watching him grow up from the 12-year-old he was last year to a fully-fledged teenage boy. He drove me crazy, he failed my class, and he was one of my favorites. He had a smile that could light up a whole classroom. I'd go out of my way to talk to him when I saw him because his green eyes and up-to-no-good smile always gave me a lift. And yesterday he drowned.
More than once I have sat in on discussions among veteran teachers recounting all of the students they have lost. And I've known that someday I would begin a list of my own, and that the longer I teach, the longer it will get. Sooner or later, everything happens. But today, I'm just so sad that it happened to Tucker.
http://www.ksl.com/?sid=30653153&nid=148&title=teen-drowning-victim-identified&s_cid=queue-14
http://www.gofundme.com/bbchp8
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