A personal reflection of a two-day online conference of the St. Maarten Catholic Education Foundation "Building Relationships between Educators and Students” By Ria Uiterloo April 2022 Some experiences shape you for life. As an 11-year-old, I started at a large Secondary school. I vividly remember a fellow classmate who was hungry early in the morning at 7 a.m. and discreetly took a bite of her sandwich. The French teacher reacted sharply to the situation: "What are you doing? Who eats during class? You have no manners! You are a pig, your mother is a mop and your father is a dishcloth"! The whole class turned to my classmate. She was shocked and sad and so were we. You could hear a pin drop. Nobody spoke in class after that incident. We comforted our classmate for the rest of the day. The recent conference “Building Relationships between Educators and Students” brought back sad episodes from my high school life. Simone Mark, an ecological pedagogue and co-fo