Draining Week or Two

This has been a draining week or last week somehow drained in to this week. Grades are coming out and it is not pretty. How does this reflect on me? Am I a bad teacher or are my students lazy? Considering the fact that most of the grades are reading logs for some strange reason or art work worked on in class, I would blame the students. Are reading logs are simple, you read in-class for ten minutes then fill out the log. A one sentence summary a day, with a five sentence summary at the end of the week. Pretty simple, blasted children can't do anything right! But, I still like them!

Then there is the student who was standing next to his friend who was shot in the head and died. How do you deal with that? He realizes that he is a lucky person, but is beginning to slip into depression. He can't sleep is having a hard time focusing and all the other things that go with an experience like that.

The next student actually had a drive-by shooting at her house, in which her brother was shot and she was grazed on the arm. Her family has decided to leave for a few weeks with the hope of an arrest, so that they don't live in fear. I'm assuming that the brother is okay because they were gone three days after the shooting.

The worst part is that some of these things I experienced myself as a teenager and I do know that it gets easier with time, but how do you explain that to traumatized teenagers. I don't know how to relate my similar experiences, so that they learn that you sort of loose feeling. I sometimes think that my heart has hardened to things like this because they no longer shock me the way they used to. I've become desensitized in a sense. But these two experiences have brought back memories that I thought were in my past.

What a student teaching experience?