Time to Put Love into Action

This cartoon by GapingVoid reminds us that whether we are students or teachers, it’s time to put our love into action…love of learning, love of teaching, love of life, love of humanity.

Last Sunday, nine people were gunned down at the Sikh Temple about a mile down the street from my school in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.  Six of those people have died. These were people who had come to the U.S. from India to improve their lives; they had come to school to learn English so that they could actively participate in American society and live their American dream.  But, some crazy, white supremacist decided to end their dreams and the dreams of their families (and his own) and take them down–children watching from the temple parking lot. Those children will never be the same.  Most of us will never be the same. ABC News

There is healing to do in the immigrant communities, in our cities, and in our country.  It is time to put our love into action. Our job teaching adult ESL is so much more than teaching words or language.  It is empowering the immigrants in this, their new world, to find their voices in learning, working, and raising families.  It’s loving and helping them learn to love and believe in themselves and in us Americans with all of our faults and failures.  This is no easy task given the volatile political climate these days in which we live.

So, as our ESL family reunites for our fall classes, our sense of security is shaken but our love of teaching and learning, and even more so, our love for our students and new found friends, remains strong.  We, the school community, will provide the security for the students to keep moving forward in their academic pursuits, and we will provide a  forum for them to use their English voices to ask the questions and express the concerns that are so heavily on their minds.

It’s time to go to work doing what we do best.  It’s time to show our students what we are made of, what most of our population is made of, and help them get on with their lives.  We learn to be watchful and wary but without living in fear.  We learn, we communicate, we battle the ignorance around us by educating ourselves and each other.  It’s time to put the love of our students, of humanity, into action.

Thank you to Hugh at GapingVoid for this cartoon.  
Their email address is: director@gapingvoidgallery.com