it is a truth universally acknowledged that if miss d is absent from school for a vacation she will always return bearing gifts.
since i began teaching three years ago i have yet to come back from my yearly family vacation to florida without a few small treats for my nuggets. i am known for the shells i find. my family and i scour the beach in the early hours of the morning to look for shells along with other precious loot from the ocean. the self-proclaimed "conch hunters" rarely come up empty-handed. until this year... by day four of hunting and finding nothing more than partial shells i began to get nervous. these kids are expecting shells. full, beautiful, shiny shells. how would they gloat to the third and fourth graders during recess if i came back empty-handed!? all i had were a few pieces of conch that i found during low tide. it was infuriating. i found all these parts of what i was looking for but could not locate what i sought in full form. these tiny fragments of shell were so beautiful and yet so disappointing because to me they represented something broken and useless. what good is a piece of shell? one day i began to pick up the pieces of broken shell and put them in my red shelling bucket. i studied them hard when i returned from my walk. it dawned on me as the sun began to rise in the sky that these shells didn't lose their beauty when they broke up into different pieces. the cracks represented life. a full life. they proved that the shells housed living creatures and protected them from the sea. a shell that's been broken is a shell that's been loved. it's funny how people are like that too. humans don't lose their beauty by being broken. if anything it adds to their worth and potential. a heart that's been broken is a heart that's been loved. and i can think of no better lesson for my students than that. today we celebrated the life that came and passed through our shells. we took time to study them and all that makes them lovely. we drew portraits of the life we imagined our shell had during its time in the ocean. my kids didn't love the shells less because they were broken. if anything the brokenness made them cooler. we're all a little bit like broken shells. but that doesn't mean we're not worth loving. from one broken shell to another, with love. ld
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