I already miss the preschool children.
Today is my first day back in the office after the last day of preschool. The past two weeks have been filled with graduation celebrations. I have attended three preschool graduations and one high school graduation. The days have been filled with laughter, hugs, picture taking and lots of noise.
This morning has been really quiet. No children laughing as they hurry to see their teacher. No smiling teachers welcoming their students for another day filled with fun and learning. Every now and then I have an urge to walk down to the preschool building…but then I realize no one is there. Our world would be a very quiet place without children and teachers.
It reminds me of a study I read about done many, many years ago at Johns Hopkins University. A young sociology professor assigned his class to a city slum to interview 200 boys. He asked them to predict their future based upon their findings.
Shocked by what they found in the slums, the students estimated that 90 percent of the boys interviewed would someday serve time in prison.
Twenty-five years later the same professor asked another group of students to try to locate the 200 boys and compare what had happened. Of 180 of the original boys located, only four had ever been to jail.
In order to determine why the predictions had not turn out as expected the students were asked to find a common denominator in the lives of the boys, some value or influence that may have marked the difference. Through more interviews, it was found that over 100 of the men remembered having the same high-school teacher, a Miss O’Rourke, who had been a tremendous influence on them at the time. After a long search, Sheila O’Rourke was found in a nursing home in Memphis.
When asked for her explanation, she was puzzled. “All I can say,” she concluded, “is that I loved everyone one of them.”
May God continue to bless our teachers and their students. One never knows what our long terms effects may be simply because “we love everyone of them.”
This is my story…