An ongoing trend in my observations of the students and my personal experience in school has been change, both gradual and instant.

When you work with a group long enough, you find yourself falling into a familiar pattern. People get used to having others around in one capacity or another, and everything becomes a little predictable. Until someone throws a stick in the spokes and things become a lot different.

Two separate events, both positive, have caused my class to shrink by 3. With the ongoing flu that seems to plague the education community at least once a year, the class numbers fluctuate day to day. The changing attendance causes the overall feeling of the class to alter in ways that are both subtle and drastic depending on the missing piece. It’s not to say that certain students have influence over the mood of others, at least not intentionally, but there is a level of normalcy that comes with a group that you see for a better part of the year and that you grow with. When you’re lacking a part, small or large, you don’t run the same.

I guess it comes down to the community that you start building on that first day of school when you, as the teacher, stand in front of this small group of students who may or may not have been in each other’s classes since Kindergarten. If you’re in my classroom, rules are set from day one that are created as a group, not dictated by the teacher, pushing all of us in the direction of forming a bond that will hopefully foster a healthy learning environment. In this environment, you become comfortable. It’s not always the most peaceful, as we are still slave to human nature and sometimes conflicts happen, but it’s what we’ve made it. It’s our own. So when it changes, we feel it. When things are off, when people aren’t present in conversations, are withdrawn or are just completely missing from the classroom in general, the whole dynamic can get thrown.