Blast from the Past

It seems that without fail, on the first day back after a long weekend, the stream of emails is endless.  Today was no different ~ although as our students are still working online, I was able to keep on top of them during the light of day.  At times, the emails were flooding my inbox at a rate much faster than I could respond. Yes, I’m one of those people who prefer to see 0 unread messages. I know, I know ~ and I’m working on it…LOL

So, amid the scrolling, clicking, rereading, sending, discarding, replying, and forwarding I came upon a name that was a blast from the past, with the subject line ~ Joel Murray Introduction.  I immediately connected the name to one of my favourite students from “years” ago and momentarily thought, “What are the chances of this sales rep (as we are receiving lots of notices about new products) having the same name as Joel?”

But to my surprise, it was not an unknown sales rep, but indeed the same Joel Murray who was a student in a grade 5 class that I taught several years ago when I was an educator at M.B. McEachren.   If someone had a camera on me at that very moment, they would have noticed my entire demeanour transform.  I was undoubtedly smiling from ear to ear and immediately transported back in time to that classroom with that group of students and Joel with his strawberry blond hair, always the consummate student, athlete, friend to all and all-round great kid.  Over the years, I’ve kept in contact with his mom as we share the same birthday, and his sister was an educator at SAC the year that we opened.  I had also had the privilege of teaching her when she was in grade five.

As I opened Joel’s email, my smile widened as he shared that he had just recently graduated Teachers’ College and had already been a guest online educator in some of our classes.   I can only imagine what my expression would have been if I been virtually popping in and out of classes and low and behold, he was there, teaching away!

I stopped answering the ever-flowing list of emails long enough to craft a response to Joel.  I was beyond thrilled that he reached out and connected!

When was the last time that a student from the past, connected with you?

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