Teaching High Risk Students

If you’re not familiar with my day job, I’m a teacher. August to May I wear two hats. Two full time hats, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. I teach at a Charter School in inner city Canton, which means I teach high risk students.

High risk means simply they have a greater chance of being a high school dropout than most. They face challenges that many of their peers do not.

My first year teaching was a breeze compared to this year. I taught at a High School where the students were privilege to say the least. That’s not to say that those students didn’t face their own obstacles in life, however, my current kiddos live life minute to minute.

The job change wasn’t ideal, and it sure wasn’t what I wanted at the time. However, the good Lord knew what he was doing when my contract was non renewed at the first school, and I was later hired at Canton Harbor.

I learned so much about not only this new population of high risk students I was hired and trusted to educate, but I also learned a great bit about myself.

If you ask my husband what my worse trait is, he’d tell you without hesitation that i’m not a patient person. I like things done now, not later, and they need to be done the way I want them done. With my students, that doesn’t work. I had to learn extra patiences with these kiddos.

Must days, high risk student’s home life situation follows them to school, and like most people, it’s hard to leave that at the door. While I make lesson plans for my classroom, I had to learn very quickly that some days, those lessons just weren’t going to happen for a magnitude of different reasons. So learning to adjust was another valuable trait that I learned quickly this school year. And anticipation. Boy, I learned a lot of that.

These kiddos though. Man these kiddos. They’re smart. Must of them have had people give up on them, and they’re still fighting. They don’t trust easily, and they absolutely despise change. Each need their own form of encouragement, and discipline. But must importantly, they need to know SOMEONE cares.

That last one can be a difficult one for some of these kiddos. They’re rough around the edges to say the least. They’ve been disappointed one too many times. They’ve been left alone when they needed someone. So they’ve built walls to protect themselves. And it’s pretty hard to penetrate those walls. But the key for a teachers is to never stop trying. Even on the hardest of days when you question yourself, never stop trying.

With an enrollment of 80, and every kid literally at different spots in their high school career, it’s an accomplishment to graduate more than 10 if seems like.

The staff at Canton Harbor graduated 25 kiddos this year. 25 well deserving students who some paced themselves, and others had to kick it into high gear to finish in time. All deserving, nonetheless. Some of these students may be the first in their family to graduate with a Diploma. Some of these students may have had family who had zero hope it would happen. And some of these students even surprised themselves.

So, to the Canton Harbor class of 2015, CONGRATULATIONS. While I may have been responsible for your social studies education, you are responsible for educating me to be a more patient, caring, aware person. And for that, I’ll be forever grateful!

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