G-Town Talks

I’ve been playing around with the presentation of my blog, but I’m now returning to the original so that my friends on the Macs can read the posts. Hope this works better for everyone.

I usually keep the posts on this blog to G-Town, seldom mixing in much that’s personal and only when it relates to the topic of the post as it relates to school. But today our border collie, Reggie, was hit by a car and he didn’t survive. He was the greatest dog, relentless with playing catch, good natured, and beautiful. I obviously didn’t do a good enough job of taking care of him. Our cairn terrier is going to be so lonely.

The worst part is telling my kids. We talked to our son and are waiting for our daughter to get home from work to tell her.

It makes me think about the times I’ve delivered bad news to students, along with whatever family member has come in to tell the student. It occurs to me that I have no idea what the “right” way is to do this, especially now that it’s my own two kids who I hate to see hurting more than anything. Factor in my own sadness and it just really stinks.

I understand that helping a child with the grief of losing a pet isn’t anything like the grief over losing a loved one, but how do you handle it in any case? Is there anything good that I can read that offers advice?

We have only one or two major assemblies per year, because I really try to guard instructional time. I receive requests for assemblies and meetings and pictures–interruptions–weekly. One of our assemblies is the “G-Town Show Down”, an annual program that is the culminating event for our positive schoolwide behavior management program. We feature student and teacher acts and it’s a blast.

For our other assembly this year, I’m pleased to welcome Rachel’s Challenge to our schools on December 1. We will host a middle school assembly in the morning, a meeting for student leaders mid-day, a high school assembly in the afternoon, and a free to the public community presentation at 7:00 that evening.

I have written about Rachel’s Challenge previously, as I attended the assembly at Silver Creek Central to check it out. If you’re an educator please go to the Rachel’s Challenge website and consider it for your school.  If you are a member of our Gowanda community, please join us at 7:00 pm on December 1 in our auditorium. I left this assembly at Silver Creek Central feeling like everything we do makes a difference and I can’t wait for our students to learn that too.