Jaredbiz.Blog

This August, I will walk into my first classroom as a full-time teacher. I’ve spent weeks preparing for this moment—arranging desks in neat rows, sharpening pencils, stacking books so their spines all face outward. The walls are covered in maps, quotes, and bright bulletin boards waiting for student work. Everything hums with that particular kind of hope that comes with a new school year. My students will spill into the room—laughing, tripping over backpacks, asking if they can sit by their friends. I will hand out pencils, books, and name tags. I will tell them, This is your space. You are safe here.

And even as I say those words, my mind will drift thousands of miles away, to you.

I think about the classrooms you should have right now—colorful, noisy, alive with curiosity. I think about the first-day-of-school outfits you should be wearing, the fresh notebooks you should be opening, the way you should be nervously glancing around to see who your seat partner might be. I think about the friendships you should be forming over playground games, the silly inside jokes that should carry you through the year. But I also know that for so many of you, those things have been stolen—replaced with rubble, silence, and fear.

I wish I could bottle the sound of my students’ laughter and send it to you, so you’d know what it feels like to be eight years old and unafraid. I wish I could wrap you in the quiet comfort of a night without sirens, a night where you can close your eyes and know that you will wake up safe. I wish I could place a book in your hands and watch your face light up as you discover its world, knowing you have time—real, uninterrupted time—to read it cover to cover.

You deserve scraped knees from running at recess, not shrapnel wounds from a war you did not choose. You deserve spelling tests and science fairs, not airstrikes and blockades. You deserve to measure time in birthdays, summer breaks, and report cards, not in funerals, food rations, and days since you last saw a loved one.

I cannot reach you. I cannot stop what rains down on your homes. And some days, that truth breaks me. Because when I look at my own students, when I hear them laugh and complain and ask endless questions, I know that you should have that too. I know that your lives should be overflowing with the same messy, beautiful ordinariness that fills my classroom.

But I can remember you. I can speak your names when the world tries to look away. I can tell my students about empathy, justice, and the belief that every child—every single one—is worthy of safety, laughter, and love. I can teach them that their voices matter, that silence is dangerous, and that the lives of children on the other side of the world are just as precious as their own.

And maybe one day, you will walk into a classroom again. Not as survivors, but simply as students. With your hands full of pencils and your heads full of dreams. With no one daring to take that away from you ever again.

Until that day comes, I will carry you in my lessons, in my heart, and in my prayers. I will imagine a world where the only thing you fear is forgetting your homework, where the loudest sound you hear is the school bell, and where the only walls you see are the ones covered in your own artwork. You deserve nothing less.

Donate to the innocent children of Gaza here: https://www.mecaforpeace.org/

With love and solidarity,

Jared ❤