The Librarian

I've officially finished one month of full-time work at Santa Barbara Junior High and boy am I tired! I think I've figured out that if I go to sleep by 10pm each night I will be feeling just perfect for the next day. But I haven't actually gone to sleep at 10pm yet!

There is a girl who is in 9th grade this year who I taught last year. She is a quiet little Mexican girl who I taught how to solve the Rubik's cube. She is a pretty good artist and her family is very poor. Every time I talk to her, she lives in a different place with another family. Her mother and her and her two younger siblings take over a room or two in a place with another family and that's how she lives. Without much.

So she stops by the junior high as she walks home from school sometimes and visits her old teachers, myself included. She was asking me how she can do community service hours and I told her she could work at the library! I told her she should just get a job there afterwards and wouldn't that be nice to get paid so she can buy her own stuff and not have her mom take her clothes and give them to her sister? We were dreaming about all this stuff and guess what?

The next time I saw her she had picked up an application to work at the main library (that she had never been to before) and was already filling it out. I need this sort of encouragement when I begin to think that my kids are worse than squirrels on coffee.