Next Saturday, I will be attending the wedding of a former student. I taught him in a college class in 1997. He was, I think, about 28 years old at the time. He was older than me and had already lived several lifetimes. He had spent 6 years locked up between the ages of 17 to 23. I was teaching an urban sociology class and our interactions were challenging to say that least. He thought that I was hopelessly naive and I thought that he was needlessly confrontational.

For several years, I heard nothing from him. This is not unusual; I don’t stay in touch with the vast majority of my former students. In 2005, eight years after we had met, I received a letter from him. He was incarcerated again. We began a correspondence that lasted beyond his release from prison in 2008. Through our letters, I learned that he had taken an instant dislike to me because he believed that I saw through him; that I considered him a fraud or perhaps even a con man. The truth, he wrote, was that he was in fact a con. He was still actively part of the gang that had led him to become a prisoner at age 17. The gang was in fact helping to cover his tuition costs when he was attending college.

In our class, we often discussed gangs. He said that he constantly worried that he would be exposed during the course. So he did what he had learned to do since he was a child, he put on a “tough guise” and cloaked himself in hostility. He wanted to make me afraid of him. If I was scared, then I would be less likely to see him for who he really was. Who he really was, according to his self-perception, was a loser.

It’s really amazing to think about what can be happening inside a person outside of our view. I, of course, had no idea that Paul (not his real name)belonged to a gang. All I knew about him was that he was usually belligerent and that his writing left much to be desired. He barely passed my class.

When he was released in 2008, we met for lunch. He told me that he had to move out of Chicago if he was going to have a chance at a different life. By this time, he had no real relationship with his birth family and his gang family expected continued loyalty. He decided that he would move to Seattle where he knew no one and where he felt that he might have a chance to start again. I paid for his plane ticket and gave him another few hundred dollars to get him started. He promised to repay me. It took him three years but he kept his promise. A year after he first moved to Seattle, he met an amazing woman who he says “took chance on him.” She too is originally from Chicago and so the wedding is taking place here.

Paul invited me to attend the wedding as a member of his family and I am beyond moved that he would do so. He and his fiance also asked me to read something at the wedding. I am always uncomfortable doing this because I feel a great deal of pressure to find just the right words to convey my hopes for the happy couple. I am still considering what to read & only have a few more days to settle on something. If inspiration doesn’t strike soon, I might have to turn to E. E. Cummings again. No one can go wrong with him…

Right now in Chicago, we are living through a teacher’s strike.

CTU Strike by Sarah J Rhee

I have heard a number of people who know little to nothing about what it takes to teach offering various opinions on the strike. I am left cold by most of the analysis and commentary. What I know for sure is that teaching is the hardest work out there. If you’ve spent 15 minutes in a classroom, I am sure that you will agree. My friend Amanda, an excellent and committed educator, wrote something in an email yesterday that really hits home:

Opened a letter from a former student this morning, sending her love and enthusiastic support. She told me to “get my mind right for a long battle.” I’ve known her since she was 14 (in juvie), and she is serving 23 (more) years in Dwight women’s prison, and knows something about long struggles. Something else that’s hard to explain to non-teachers about teaching: the ways that our students teach us and change us.

Paul often says that I was instrumental in helping him to change his life. I don’t know that this is true. He is the one who did the heavy lifting. But Amanda’s words do ring true too; for many of us who consider ourselves to be educators, what cannot ever be underestimated are “the ways that our students teach us and change us.”