7th Equality Journal

Last Tuesday night I went to this thing at the Kutztown Tavern called Theology on Tap. It's a thing that this church group does once a month. They have a prominent person come in and talk about something relating to theology. It is a lot like church.
Well last week after the leader was done talking he opened the floor up for discussion and a middle aged woman at the table next to me raised her hand. She started talking about she had been a teacher for 12 years at a private school and taught all college level classes to "gifted" highschool students. She said she liked her job, but was looking for something new. So she got a new job. She became a tenth grade english teacher at an urban school (she didn't mention the name). She taught one class that consisted of tenth grade boys who all had a parole officer. She admitted that at first she was very anxious about teaching this class of boys, but she did it anyway.
When she got past the initial difference between the public school and the private school, she started to realize what fabulous kids she was teaching. They started reading Macbeth, and she said that she enjoyed teaching it so much more to this class, rather than the private school kids, because they understood the emotions in the story so much better. She said that they were so much responsive to the learning and actually valued the information, not just the grade.
While she was teaching this class she came to admire one boy in particular. She said that he was a fabulous writer and everything he wrote she holds very dear to her heart. One day the teachers were alerted that a child was selling drugs in school and the cops were called in. It turned out that the boy selling the drugs was the boy in her class that she liked so much.
He wasn't in her class at the time that the cops came in, but when the cops came for him he said that he would like to make use of his one call. He said he wanted to go see Mrs. Henry (the teacher). He walked into her classroom, an African American, 6'2, 10th grade boy, with shackles around his wrists and surrounded by two policeman, and walked straight up to her at the front of the class and collapsed into her arms. He was sobbing. He told her he was so so so sorry for letting her down like this. He promised her that nothing like that would ever happen again, and reiterated that he was very sorry. She looked him in the eye and told him that the only person he was letting down was himself, because, "you have so much good inside of you...you have so much potential to do good..." she told him.
I think that this is an extremely compelling story. When she said this I really did have tears in my eyes, which says a lot because I don't cry easily. This goes along with equality and respect theme that I've been talking about a lot. You know that the students she was teaching prior to this 10th grade class had very few educational opportunities compared to the students she had been teaching. This is so sad because the lady recognized that these children were just as apt to learn and succeed as the others, they just didn't have the chance to. I really wonder that if that boy would have gone to school at the private school and had those types of opportunities if he would be in the same place that he is in today.