The Unexpected

Yeah, so I'm a teacher.  It's still hard to wrap my head around.  I just finished my 7th week.  Seriously?  It's so insane!  And there's only 33 weeks to go.  Ok, I know that seems like a lot, and it most certainly is, but this year is pretty much flying by.  I'm nearly done with my Civics class.  We're on the block schedule, so every class that's typically a year is done in a semester, and semester classes are done in a marking period.  It's so wild.  All of this is wild.  I thought that I had this stuff figured out.  But then something happened on Thursday that messed me up.

There's a quiet girl in my Academic Literacy class named Genesis.  She sits in the back corner and doesn't say much in class unless prompted.  She doesn't seem to have many friends.  I thought that I kind of bonded with her because she wore a Zelda shirt one day and I was really pumped.  Sometimes we would talk about Harry Potter after class for a couple minutes.  But on Thursday, she walked up to me and said "I pretty much hate everyone else, so I'm going to give this to you."  It was a letter that she had written.  It talked about how the quiestest ones have the most to say.  She mentioned how her voice is going hoarse from silence.  Nobody notices, or at least not the ones you want to notice.  I was worried when I read this.  I wasn't sure if it was one of those cry for help notes.  It didn't seem suicidal or anything like that.  But I was still worried about her.  I talked to her on Friday, and she asked if she could hang out in my class instead of going to Art.  I was cool with it, and went to talk to the art teacher to let her know.  The art teacher said that Genesis would talk with her about the huge crush she has on me.  She told me to be careful and keep the door open.  That was strange.  I don't know how to handle this stuff!  There're a few things I never learned in school, and how to handle 14 year old girls is one of them.  I mean, I don't want her to hate life, but I certainly don't want to give her the wrong idea.  Ugh...this is confusing.