Glowing Report

Yesterday I received encouraging news from my blind friend who teaches English in a public high school. She’d just written a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, which she shared with me in an email.  I asked her permission to reprint it here, which she granted.  Enjoy it and be blessed.

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As a teacher, I can attest to the pain felt by educators like myself who contemplate the horror of the school shootings in Connecticut. We can't help but imagine the innocent victims and the troubled shooter in the faces of those who fill our schooldays. However, the students in my creative writing class offered an inspiring contrast to the pain this holiday season.

One student shared that her mom was planning forty-five acts of kindness in 2013 to celebrate turning forty-five, which prompted my students to initiate a charitable outreach that amazed me. These thirty-one teenagers prepared gift baskets for our school’s sixteen custodians, twelve cafeteria workers, fifteen moderately to profoundly disabled special needs students, and two teachers who had experienced family tragedies in the fall – completely organizing and executing the effort without supervision. They also secretly collected money to donate toward gifts purchased for children in the hospital over the holidays. Lastly, on the day of their final exam time with me, they stuffed 100 baggies with candy and cookies, and then deployed to every wing in the building five minutes before the period ended to offer the goodie bags, and holiday wishes, to random students finishing their exams. Ironically, this last gesture occurred on the day when we were in an informal lockdown due to unsubstantiated rumors of a potential school shooting, rumors that ended up being false but that almost caused my students to abort this last act of kindness because of restricted movement in the hallways.

My students did all of this hoping to stay below the radar. They do not know I am writing this letter to the newspaper, not yet anyway. Their selfless actions invite me to consider the power in orchestrated kindness, even more than in orchestrated evil. My thirty-one students are as mixed as everyone else in this world: some athletic, some not; some wealthy, some poor; some intellectual, some nonacademic; some happy, some troubled. However, they looked beyond their differences to corporately reach others, and they did that multiple times in multiple ways.

I salute them, and I salute all of those who make an effort to seek ways to lift up others. If we all lived with that as a goal, the spirit of the season would be bigger and brighter than any shadows, and we would all be better for its glow.