Great Stories part II: False alarm.

“It took a couple months, but eventually I finally managed to contact O. I knew she was pregnant based on her Senior Transition Questions, which I had assumed would complicate things when it came to getting her into school soon. To my surprise, in our first conversation she was completely open with me about preparing to be a mother and that she was actually planning to go to MATC in the Spring for Early Childhood Education and had almost all of the paperwork done for enrolling. With unenrolled students it is always difficult to know what exactly they are planning when you haven’t talked to them yet, so all of this coming from O was a pleasant surprise.

After our initial conversation I checked in with O a couple of times to make sure her plans hadn’t changed, and of course they had not. She was determined to go get an education. In one of our conversations I asked how things were going in general and she responded with “Painful… having contractions.” For a good five minutes I was stressing out about how to respond to that. It’s not exactly a text one expects to read on a given day. I wished her luck and said we would be in contact soon.

The anticlimactic ending to the story is that the contractions were not due to labor, and O gave birth to a baby boy a few weeks later. I have only talked to her once since the baby, and it has proven to be a much harder adjustment than she expected. I had assumed that having a child to care for would change her outlook on school, but all it did was push back her timeline a semester. She is still planning on attending MATC in the Fall of 2016, truly showing her dedication and determination to the idea of college.”

Since I wrote this, O has continued moving forward with her plans to enroll in the fall.  She has never been one of my more talkative students, but that determination for going to school is commendable since she has constantly been making progress whenever I talked to her.  She wants to go for early childhood education, something I can imagine she would be good at and passionate about.