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I sat in a meeting a couple of weeks ago with a parent, sobbing on the phone about one of my students:
“I can’t save him!” she cried. “I try so hard, and do everything I can, but I just can’t save him!”
I looked at the other people at the table, and we shared her sorrow. Like her, we were trying to do everything we could for her son, only for our efforts to seemingly be made to no avail, on a daily basis.
That reality, as well as many realities of working in an inner-city school with kids suffering a lot of brokenness in their lives, gave me the hard but necessary reminder: I am not a savior. We are not saviors.
It is the oft-ridiculed stereotype of white teacher, black/Latino student movies like Freedom Writers and Finding Forrester to portray white teachers as being saviors to black kids. The teachers single-handedly turn the troubled lives of their underserved and underprivileged students.
I do not doubt that many of these teachers, whose true stories movies are based on, do great work for their kids and go above and beyond. I endeavor to be one of those teachers, even if I’m not there yet.
But kids are their own individuals. They make their own choices. As a teacher, I am not their savior. I can be their champion…
