Day 94- tables are turned!

Well things are about to get interesting, y’all! You’ll NEVER believe what happened to me today…I made someone CRY!!! It was awful and embarrassing and I felt about two inches tall.

But let me start from the beginning:

I am on campus at Liberty for one week to finish my LAST class in grad school. I was feeling chipper and excited in class Monday morning and I was, of course, participating in class discussion. I won’t get into the specifics because it would take forever to explain, but I shared an experience I had during my student teaching about a student who, I felt, seemed to take advantage of his circumstances and I described it as “working the system.” And that’s when it happened…a classmate raised her hand and, with tears streaming down her face, told the class about a horrible car accident she was in in high school. This accident left her with a serious brain injury that required her to receive special education for her remaining years in high school and then she said these exact words “so before you assume a student is ‘working the system’ you should be more sensitive to that student’s experiences and needs.”

It was MOR.TI.FY.ING!!!! I wanted to run out of the classroom. I could just feel the accusations in the air. I didn’t listen to a single thing the professor said for the next hour as I practiced an apology in my head, or worked myself up into quite a defensive state, or stared longingly at the clock. I was pretty much hating myself all day.

After class I dumped my stuff and immediately went for a run around campus where I continued to think about how to handle this situation…I wanted to defend myself and explain to this person, to the entire class in fact, that I wasn’t an insensitive person and I would never assume something about my students and I AM A NICE PERSON DARN IT!!!! I wanted to drive home and spend the night with the one person who knows my heart inside and out and make him make me feel better. But finally, after a lot of thought, I realized that all I needed to do was apologize to my classmate. I didn’t need to defend myself, because no matter what I MEANT to say, my words had hurt someone. It was my words that dredged up a lot of pain for someone else, and no matter my true intentions; I owed that person an apology.

In some ways this realization made me feel better because I knew that I could make this right. But in other ways it made me feel awful because I had to accept responsibility for hurting someone’s feelings. So I got back to my room, had a good cry over the entire situation, and practiced my apology for the next day.

Apology Update to follow!