One recent morning, a student asked me not to take her phone, as is class policy. “Please, Teacher, my mom was in an accident in Mexico.”

What eventually came out was her mother was crossing the border and somebody called her phone and said her mother had been in an accident. She didn't know where her mother was or even if she was alive. Her brother had been traveling with her mother and she hadn't been able to contact him either. She had called the coyote and he hadn't answered either.

So she sat in class to learn about Native Americans crossing the land bridge 10,000 years ago and thought about her mother trying to cross the border the day before. How important is one compared to the other? Yet our compromise was that I kept her phone during class and gave it to her any time it rang.

Her mother did not call during the class.

Last week, when we were discussing how Native Americans built their homes and the natural resources they used, I had students draw their houses. One student drew a beautiful house: two floors, a balcony, two cars, a large yard with palm trees. I saw it, exclaimed over it and asked him to tell me about it. He told me about “one car for work and one car for home.” And the yard where he played with his sister, and then he drew a little bullet in the upper right hand corner and said, “This is the bomb that landed here,” and pointed to a palm tree.

Then he said, “This picture is no good.”

I took it from him and said, “This picture is perfect.”

In this holiday season, I am thinking about privilege. The family of my student worried about her mother are poor, economic refugees from gang warfare and poverty. The student whose house was bombed is a legal refugee, privileged to be in the U.S., but escaping the notorious word: Aleppo. Both of them are lost souls seeking to make meaning of the chaos they have left and the chaos they have brought with them. As their ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) teacher, I am the person most immediately tasked with helping them navigate the chaos of their new language. But we, as the community of Baltimore (city, county and beyond), have a job of helping them make sense of their new land.

The word I have heard a lot, both in the election cycle and in my job, is “overrun” — as in “we are being overrun.” But the way I see it is that despite our recent tumultuous election, and the uncertainty of the future, we Americans have the privilege of stability. We have the warmth and the wealth of a region and a nation to welcome the tired and the poor. Reaching out and welcoming these newcomers to our community builds bridges that we get to cross.

In a few weeks, we will inaugurate a man who has called for my students to be deported or registered as a potential threat to national security. The greatest thing I can do over the next four years, is to suit up and show up and care for the charges that Baltimore City Public Schools has entrusted to me. I am not being naïve. The threat of poverty, low-wage work and incarceration/deportation is a reality. I can be the greatest teacher in the world, but I can't change the world, its laws or the way my students are perceived.

We here in Baltimore have many privileges to support us. Even things we may not think of as privilege, like a peaceful transition of power. Privilege is wonderful, but it is also tends mask an outside reality that is not as clean, shiny and sanitized. So I am grateful for the reminders from my students that show up and let me know how good I have it. It is not pity. It is joy.

Emilita Poling is an ESOL Teacher at Patterson High School; her email is emilita.poling@gmail.com.