My Students

They make me laugh.  They make me cry.


They drunk call me when I'm hanging out with friends in the city to find out when I'll be back to campus.  They grab me and hug me over and over, bouncing with excitement as they tell me how they've got a volunteer job teaching English in rural parts of Sichuan.


I miss America, and so many of you people there, yet I am so privileged to be teaching here.  I love my students so much that it's exhausting and exhilarating and I feel sometimes like it's shooting out of my fingertips and the ends of my hair, as George Bailey promised the moon would if he lassoed it and Mary swallowed it in It's a Wonderful Life.


There are these fault lines of hurt and brokenness running through the hearts of many of my students that I can barely even fathom, but as we get closer, I'm getting more glimpses.  If you want a window into their lives, and how you can be thinking of them and their needs that go so far beyond learning English, check out this article: The Routine Farewells of Left-Behind Children  As a warning, it's heartbreaking.  And it's reality for so many of my students.

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