11/25/2013

#30GOALS CHALLENGE: Goal #20: Confront the Issues

After reading Shelly Terrell´s blog post: Confront the Issues Goal#20, now I understand why she liked my "Underage Drinking" project Padlet work.
It was a reflection of my students on drinking excessively and without caring about anything or not even thinking of the consequences.




There were moments in my teaching career that really marked a sort of before and after …the killing of a whole family: parents and two of three children plus a friend who stayed at their home that night Feb 17, 1994. The only survivor, Matías. who is now about in his late thirties, became my student after this tragedy had hit his family. How was I supposed to teach a child in his situation? As our school is a small community, I had known his parents and his siblings for more than ten years. It is really hard to explain how much we all cried, and suffered…it is a long story. 
While teaching in the US some other type of unfortunate events also hit the school community because we lost students in unbelievable situations which were car wrecks mainly. The High School I worked at had formed a SADD (Students Against Drunk Driving) team and the events they planned were amazingly touching and moving: members of the team would sit quietly in their classes all dressed in black representing Death itself, or they would have a simulation of a funeral in front of the school main entrance: all those activities were meant to raise awareness. I hope they did the same way they shocked me!. 

Now that I´ve been back in my country for a while, I´ve been trying to pass on these experiences to my classes, which in the end will save 1, 2 or 3 as Shelly stated on his blog post. I have been trying hard to spread the word: take care of yourself, we live in a huge city and the risks are too many! Let´s care about ourselves and love life!



During my teaching career, believe it or not and I think it is a God sent message, I have always had conversations of very deep content with my students because of the way the school administrators trust me as well as parents and students themselves. When you have this sort of opportunity, you just need to be careful and cautious with what you say and how you say it. Unfortunately since I came back, I realized that accidents like the one I mentioned above are happening here in Argentina, too. Why? Because teenagers are teenagers and have always been like that: as usual the lyrics of a song come to my mind:  this time “James Dean” by the Eagles: “…you were too fast to live, to young to die, bye bye!” …



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