Page 66 - 2024-2025 Creative Writing

Leaving

Anna is a teacher who just graduated from university. She is an elementary teacher,

specifically, which means she works with young children a lot. The only job she could find

was as a teacher in an orphanage center and she had no choice but to take the offer.

Anna went to the orphanage center for the first time to teach. One thing she noticed was

almost half the kids had some sort of disability. She was assigned to teach 8-year-olds. The

first subject was math and she was supposed to teach “fractions” and how they function.

Anna tried to get the children’s attention but no one was listening. After about ten minutes

of hard work, she finally got the student’s attention but the second she tried to teach, the

whole class started yelling except one boy who seemed to be always trying his best to pay

attention. A whole week passed like this and Anna lost it. She started shouting angrily at the

kids, throwing around objects and making a mess. The boy she noticed earlier came up to
her and pulled her by her shirt just before she stormed out the door and he asked, “Are you

going to leave us just like our parents did?”. Anna stood there with a stone-cold face thinking

about what she had done to those kids. Seeing her reaction the boy says with a cracking

voice.

“Please, don’t leave us. We promise we will try our best to be normal.”

Tears started to pour from her eyes. Anna regretted everything at that moment. She

regretted pushing the kids to learn like “normal” children and got frustrated when they

couldn’t. She regretted yelling at the kids who couldn’t hold their pens the correct way even

though she knew they had difficulties. She regretted making them feel abnormal--different

from the others. Anna realizes she isn’t suited to be a teacher because she doesn’t have that

one quality of a teacher which is accepting their students for who they are.

M. Tsogtkhuslen 11C