Story 1: School w/in a School..ongoing

     She was small for her age, and simply dressed.  Clean, but a bit ragged around the edges.  I remember looking down at her little feet as she tentatively and gently stepped through the door.  She had white tennis shoes on, neatly tied, but the canvas top was frayed and on the verge of pulling away from the white rubber edge holding her shoe together.  The young lady was wearing no socks to keep her toes warm in this February winter.

     The girl had long hair, the color of the whitest corn silk spun soft like a spider's web.  Her braids were crisp, and tight... they meant business.  Her sky-blue eyes were framed by eyelashes that shone gold in the morning sun as it invaded my classroom through the lone window.  Her face was pale, with a tiny hint of freckling sprinkled across her nose and cheeks.  Holding her notebook tightly against her thin sweater, she looked directly into my eyes and cleared her throat.

     Watching this middle-school child gather her courage, with every breath drawn and the settling of her shoulders, I welcomed her with a smile, that I hoped was welcoming.  I noted the lightening quick glances her eyes made as they calculated the ilk of her new peers.  She was the last of my hand picked students to arrive and gather for their first day in my School-within-a-School classroom.

     Looking over the heads of my new students, corralled without their acceptance in a Portable building, with a leaky ceiling and flimsy, bouncy floor,  I gazed at the posters I hung the night before.  "To be heard, is the gateway to being understood" and "Write to be understood, Speak to be heard, Read to grow"...... Feeling my confidence waver, and knowing that the reading levels of my students tested between first grade and tenth grade skill, I swallowed hard.  Because it was a new environment for my students, and their faces were not familiar to each other, they were noticeably compliant and even attentive.  They all looked so young and fresh and innocent to me, and I had to find the steel in my backbone to find my voice. 

"Good morning."   There.  The oxygen seemed to come back into the room for me to breathe.  "I am so glad you are here with me."   Thus, began my new journey as a teacher in an unprecedented program for the district, and it was all mine.
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     Through that year, I learned more than my students did.  I worked with young men that were farmers and mechanics after school, and much bigger and bolder than I would ever be.  I had students that were mothers already at the age of 13 and 14, and most all of my students lived in a squalor that my own mother would have been appalled at.  Most of the children lived in homes that no longer had a foundation or floor, and sweeping the loose mud and sand out of their living room was a daily chore. The vocabulary of my students sometimes shocked me, sometimes tickled me, but always amazed me.  These students grew up in a bubble community.   A community that had a strong current of faithfulness to one another, yet a violence and a passion that could turn crazy at the turn of the moon.  These children, sitting in quiet expectation in front of me on that first day, showed me how much courage and humor we ALL have inside of us...as a human trait regardless of our situations.

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hello friends:
This is just bits and pieces of a story I have started.   I would love to have some feedback and would appreciate knowing if this would be interesting to continue writing, or if I should explore other options.....