Friendships in Final Exams

I cried at work today.

I was marking the last few final essays for my grade ten courses and was getting geared up to plan the next semester. I flipped the essay stack thinking only about how many I had already marked and how I hoped the next few would go quickly. I was unprepared, therefore, for what awaited me.

The essay before me was fairly innocuous, at first. The introduction was plot driven, restatement and a general frisson of disappointment. I had been drilling essay structure and outline form for awhile and I had half hoped that some of it would come through for the final exam, even if I had not seen it materialize during the course.

The topic was friendship, the excerpt a classic email forward type short story, I am sure you know the one: boy walks home with an armload of books, someone knocks them over and the someone else comes along to help him out, makes friends with him and ends up saving his life. We had struggled with the idea of even including it, it seemed too easy, too mundane, too straight forward to relate ideas of friendship and its values to the literature we had explored over the semester. But we kept it because we wanted the kids to succeed and to take away a sense that they had a topic that they could relate to and understand.

As I continued to read, it became apparent to me that this kid--a slight boy with tousled black curls and a gentle humour--was baring his soul to me on his final exam. That he had been in the shoes of the boy from the excerpt. That he, too, had been saved. And that the time they had spent together was in my class. And that he felt "amazed by how the story relates to me. But it can also relate to everybody."

Teachers, of literature especially, often fantasize about choosing *that* piece of literature that is going to change someone's life. That the trajectory of their world would be vastly different if not for those moments, those 80 minute stretches of time in dingy overcrowded classrooms, that make them feel whole again, that make them feel valued. I am humbled. I didnt feel like I had changed anything at all and then some kid comes along and feels comfortable enough during a final exam to tell me about his friend who "helped me find other friends and even got into one of my school classes. If not for him, I would have no friends at all."

It is hard to really describe the emotions of this day; elation, pride, shocked, overwhelmed. I dont know that it changes anything about my teaching style. If anything I suppose I shouldnt change anything at all. But since I always tell my students that I dont share literature with them to torture them or to make their days hell, but simply to share different perspectives and experiences. I am glad that something I did faciliated something so right.

You see, the student in question, I learned today, had been taken to the hospital close to the start of the year. Depression had settled heavily upon him. Fear and danger kept the administration hovering around him in case he slipped into self harming behaviour, but as the year wore on, they hovered less and he came out of his shell more.

I want to shout his story from the rooftops, but I have a feeling that the student who helped him would also be as surprised as I was today to find out this revelation. His small acts of kindness were not, are not heavily lauded. And perhaps they shouldnt be. My student, as I said, is a quiet and private citizen. It is enough, perhaps that I know.

There are no words to express this relief: that dark days do have rays of hope, that small acts of kindness really do change lives and that sometimes, just sometimes, we are lucky enough to know the impact we have had.