Colorado teacher’s third grade assignment gone viral online leading other schools to join in

A teacher from Colorado had posted notes from her third grade students’ assignment online which gained massive attention in social media under the hashtag #IWishMyTeacherKnew on Friday and had gone viral.

The third grade teacher, Kylie Schwartz, 26, had asked the 8 to 9-year-olds at her Denver inner city school to write something about their lives that they wished she knew about them. This assignment, which had been like a revelation to her, was conducted partly as a writing exercise along with a way of getting to know her students.

There were responses such as “I don’t have pencils at home to do my homework,” and “I want to go to college,” as well as a girl talking about how she had no friends to play with at recess.

The teacher had shared photographs of the some of the notes on Twitter when similar messages and pictures started flooded in from schools all over the world.

Schwartz, a suburban girl has been teaching at southwest Denver Doull Elementary for 3 years has said that she has conducted this exercise each year, one of the reasons being, she wanted to focus of the poverty issue in the inner cities of U.S.

Amongst the 532 students of Doull’s almost 90% of them is Hispanic and 46% of the class are English Language learners.

According to Schwartz, one of the messages which gained a lot of attention and sympathy had been of a girl who said she missed her father after he had been deported to Mexico several years back.

“That student comes to school each day with a smile on her face,” Schwartz said, adding that she probably never would have known of what the girl had been going through if it wasn’t for the hand-written note.

The students were told that if they wished they could write their messages anonymously, but most of them were happy sharing their messages with their classmates with their names mentioned.

The girl with the note which mentioned she had no friends to play with at recess got a lot of attention.

Schwartz mentioned that the message had been “heartbreaking,” but that she was delighted to see how the other students united together to support the child who wrote it.

“The next day at recess, all the girls huddled around her and played tag,” Schwartz said.

“A lot of what we’re teaching is how to be a good friend. My students’ emotional needs are just as important as their academic needs.”