I work in as a teacher in a low income area and today was conference week which always brings to light some depressing stories. In one such conference I found out that what I knew was a bad situation for one of my students was getting worse (grandma, one of the only stable members of the household is losing her fight with cancer). Then I found out the student, who had stopped bringing his backpack weeks ago, had stopped because a student on the bus had made fun of it daily since it had Spider-Man on it (they are third graders for goodness sakes) so he hid it from his mom. To be honest this kid drives me a bit nuts as he hardly works and often has a poor attitude. However after his mom and I had a long talk we both decided we needed to take a different approach to try to reach him. So last night my husband and I searched for a "cool enough" backpack (that we could afford) with his expertise as a 5th grade teacher and finally ordered one off Amazon. This morning I pulled the student to the side, explained the new plan to help him get his work done and showed him the new backpack. I got a tiny guarded smile. While it may not seem like much I swear, it is the first smile I've gotten from this kid! Better yet, he actually did work all day! It definitely made my day :)

tl;dr I bought a student a backpack and got the first smile I've seen on him all year!