Last week, a Colorado elementary school teacher started a project on social media to get to know her students better.
The project has gone viral now with the hashtag #IWishMyTeacherKnew trending on Twitter. There were more than 25,000 tweets with the hashtag at the time of writing this.
Kyle Schwartz, an elementary school teacher, asked her students to write down something they would like her to know about them.
Some of the responses were heartbreaking. One student told Ms Schwartz that he did not have any pencils at home to do his homework. Another wished that his teacher knew he didn't have friends to play with. Ms Schwartz shared her students' notes on Twitter and asked other teachers to do the same.
Her idea caught on and similar hard-hitting notes from students began appearing on Twitter, making the campaign go viral.
In an interview to
ABC News , Kyle Schwartz said that the majority of her students come from underprivileged homes.
"As a new teacher, I struggled to understand the reality of my students' lives and how to best support them. I just felt like there was something I didn't know about my students," she said.