lightning strikes

lightning strikes, originally uploaded by Blog-Sothoth.

My seventh graders had heard about the boy killed at The Book. I told them that the boy's cousin was a former student of mine, and asked them to make him cards to cheer him up at the holidays. Some of the rougher kids said things like "Fuck that n*****. We don't know him. He might have had it coming." Others took to it in the spirit of the holidays and channeled their own experience of loss.

I find out more about my kids through this form of expression than I ever would through a zillion writing assignments. So many have lost mothers, uncles, fathers, cousins, and brothers to the the streets--to these kids dying a natural death from old age is shocking and unusual.