When the weather turns colder people stay inside and turn inward, making fall and winter a time of introspection and depression for many. I went to a funeral last Saturday, then went hiking Sunday morning and felt happier, more alive and connected than I felt to anything or anyone in weeks. Several times my eyes welled with tears on Saturday, especially when my mother started crying, and by Sunday my spirit found new heights. The smell of the woods, the harvested crops, the slight wind against my face, the yellow and red leaves sent me soaring.

And then everything changed again. My sleep patterns have been off for a few weeks. My teaching patterns have been off all year because of constant interruptions, from school and my private life.

A father shared the story of his daughter's life during an assembly this week. He spoke for an hour in a cafetorium with bad sound in a voice not trained for public speaking. His diction rose above the level of most of the students while he kept a monotone that sent many students' heads down. A poster board with his daughter's picture stood center stage, which the man paced around. I knew this would be a serious talk, that there would be some lesson about the dangers of drug use. I had no idea this man would send such a ripple through so many people's lives in one hour.

This man, a doctor, lost his daughter in March of 2003. She died of a heroin overdose at the age of twenty. On the surface that seems sad, but it is a tragedy many people dismiss without pondering the details and the devastation. Everyone loses something they cannot replace; everyone endures a dramatic event. This man spoke of his daughter's promising life and how the thousands of little decisions she made over the course of seven years led her down a path that ended with her death. He wanted the students to appreciate their parents’ intrusions rather than loathe them. He wanted the students to understand how a good life gets destroyed, how one's values change, and how easy it is to lose oneself. I noticed several students were sleeping halfway through the assembly. I thought he had some good points to make but that it was not a terribly impressive speech. Then he brought out his radio.

We took a journey with this man through his daughter's life. At the end she was trying to get clean and had turned to her parents for help. I will not repeat the story of her last night. He told it very matter-of-factly, even making the horrid details somewhat bland. And then he proceeded to tell the audience that in an effort to make things as real as possible, he would play the 911 call he made to report his daughter had no pulse and no heartbeat and to request an ambulance.

After that, my whole week changed. I couldn't teach the class period following the speech. Girls were crying in the hallway. The mood was too somber to even attempt a lesson about grammar, let alone a short story about a moustache. My class wanted to talk and time to process this story, so we discussed it and it became this open forum for sharing personal stories of heartache. By the end of the period, two girls were bawling, two girls had talked about their dead fathers, one girl talked about drug use and running away, others shared stories of death and sadness. I felt lost on my way to lunch.

By ninth period I was too tired to really teach any more. The students worked on a packet but a few seemed to feel like I did and couldn't focus on work, so four of us sat in a little circle and talked for awhile.

The strange thing is that the somber mood carried over, accompanying the cold and rain to stifle the passions inherent in a school day. My teaching suffered noticeably the rest of the week and I could see the more sensitive students couldn't find their joy. One of my classes did a section on war stories, four of them, and there was no inspiration to discuss them or analyze them. I went to the bookstore today in search of a few books that fall under the hopeful/happy ending category to recommend to the students and the titles I found all included these awfully dark parts before the redemptive endings, and I couldn't even stomach those dark parts. The hopeful endings sometimes aren't worth the pain it takes to get there.

And then I got the idea for a positive newspaper. The only news reported involves negative things, the more violent and base the better. Wouldn't it be great if there were a daily news outlet dedicated to highlighting the positive contributions of humanity? To be hopeful and happy is to be naive and uninformed in our society, but one should never be slighted for abstaining from cynicism.

I know something is amiss when my students journal about two good things that happened to them in a week and they struggle to find even one, but they create a laundry list of bad things in a moment.