A Little Topsy Turvy...

First of all, thanks to all you lovely ladies for all your encouraging/helpful comments about my poor laptop! I know she'll come back in one piece and although it's extremely inconvenient to have to re-load literally everything back onto it, something happened to me today that made me realize how lucky I am to even have a computer to re-load silly songs and pictures onto.

While analyzing some test scores with a co-worker of mine today, she asked why one of my students hadn't taken the county math test yet. I told her that there was a death in the family and she (the student) would be back next week. My co-worker immediately got a look of panic on her face and said to me eight of the scariest words I've heard in awhile:"Do you think they went home to Haiti?"

Knowing that the large family were immigrants from the island, I (literally) ran to another teacher's classroom, who had the little girl's older brother in class. This teacher, who had obviously been crying all morning, confirmed that, according to her student, the family was planning to travel to Haiti for the funeral. After standing there in shock and asking a lot of unanswered questions, I walked back to my classroom as calmly as I could and tried calling all of the emergency contacts I could find. No one answered.

I spent the rest of the day both trying to return to normal, and not let the rest of my students know that anything was wrong, and worrying, hoping for some sort of contact. Administration spent most of the day trying to confirm the family's whereabouts, but since I work on a military base, with all military employee parents, information was not exactly forthcoming. We plan to resume the phone calls in the morning.

Although we aren't letting students know our panic yet, our school is organizing a fundraiser to help the victims of this terrible tragedy. I know a lot of my followers are fellow teachers, and I urge you to encourage your school to do the same. In the meantime, please keep not only my student and her family in your prayers, but also all of those touched by this awful event.