I teach at a community college in a small southern Virginia city that prosperity has passed by. During the last few years the traditionally low-paying tobacco and textile industries have skipped town and left thousands of workers and the city struggling for work and a new identity. Many of them wind up at the community college as displaced workers in need of retraining.
Sixty-three percent of the births in the city are outside of marriage. One quarter of high school students drop out. Seventy-three percent of all students qualify for free or reduced lunches. Almost 42 percent of the children in the city live below the state’s poverty level. Many of these children years later, a GED under their belt, return to the community college, fighting a lifetime of low education, low income, apathetic families, violence, and abuse.
The conversation between the instructors about these students is often accompanied by a lot of head shaking and a general discouragement about what can be done about the lack of motivation and ability.
But what a laboratory this situation is to learn eternal lessons about looking upon the hearts of the students as the Lord must.
Dreadlocks and do-rags
One early-morning business English course brought into my classroom a young black man I probably would have feared upon seeing if I had met him on a street. I know I certainly would have crossed the street to the other side and held onto my pocketbook.
And, trust me, when you are required the first day of class to go over the measures to take during a lockdown if there is a shooter on the campus, your antenna is always up.
This young man had a head full of dreadlocks under a do-rag, big jacket and baggy pantsthe bane of a teacher’s existence! He slipped into the front row, which I noted as unusual since the front seats are usually reserved for the latecomers. I sighed inwardly and figured that he probably wouldn’t last the semester. Unfortunately, stereotypes usually are preceded by experiences and I have taught long enough to figure out early on which students could make it to the finish line. Or so I thought.
He was quiet, though, and didn’t cause any trouble as the days turned to a couple of weeks into the semester. Then one morning as the students were taking their daily reading quiz, I caught his eye as he seemed to be struggling to remember an answer.
“I know where it is on the page,” he said. “I just can’t remember the answer.” He proceeded to tell me exactly what the answer looked like on the page.
Intrigued, I asked, “Do you have a photographic memory or something?”
“Pretty much,” he said.
I found out over the course of the next few weeks that he did. He also was one of the better writers in the class and usually got an A on his assignments. He was also helpful to the other students and willing to push his book over to help a student who had forgotten, or lost, his.
We started to talk on and off, and he told me that when he was four he and his mother witnessed somebody getting hit by a car and the driver leaving the scene. The police came and asked his mother if she had gotten the license plate number. She hadn’t, but he had! Since that time he had been known for his memory.
One day after I had shared information with my class about my daughter who has cerebral palsy, he started telling me about his four year old son who was autistic and had been with him for the weekend and nearly “driven him crazy.” He had taken his son down to a neighbor’s to play, and one of the children had called him “weird.”
“That hurt me real bad, Ms. Elzey,” he said. I told him I understood.
Yes, he had three illegitimate children and he was struggling with the mother of his son about the care and custody of the child. But he was doing his best, and his mother was doing her best to help her son and her grandson with multiple, serious problems working against them.
“I’ve got to get some education and take care of these kids,” he said.
To his face, I let him know he was one of the best writers in the class and would probably get an A. On my knees, I repented of my judgmental attitude.
Painful knees
In another class, I was faced with another typical studentan older student returning to class after having lost his job. He was a veteran on disability, although not an apparent one. He said he had trouble with his legs. He could hardly speak so I could understand him, much less write a coherent sentence. On one paper he even spelled his name wrong.
What an annoyance to me. After so many years of not knowing how to write and how to study, how could he possibly expect to succeed? I tried my best, I really did, but if you make it to 50 years old without knowing how to recognize a run-on sentence, what chance is there that you will ever learn it? And how important is it really?
At one point in the semester his task was to present an oral presentation with at least eight PowerPoint slides. He had no idea how to do one. As I remember, a student much like my first example decided to help him in the computer lab and together they put together some slides and just-barely-literate explanations.
His presentation weighed me in the scale and found me lacking. The slides illustrated his service in Vietnam as a young soldier and how he earned a Purple Heart putting wounded soldiers on a helicopter before him, even though he had been shot in the leg himself. He didn’t remember many of the details because he passed out soon after helping his buddies.
One older student stood up and gave him a standing ovation at the end of the presentation. I’ll never forgive myself for not leading the whole class in following his example.
Seeing the heart
I’m still not perfect at looking first at the heart and not at the appearance. But now as new students come into my class with dirty hands from the mechanics class they are taking before mine, or the rotted teeth from a lifetime of no dental care, or poor grammar, or raggedy sweatshirts, or even black eyes from who knows what kind of abuse, I say a prayer for divine help to refrain to judgingandto reach out with compassion.
I love the line “In the quiet heart is hidden / Sorrow that the eye can’t see” in the beautiful lyrics by Susan Evans McCloud in the hymn “Lord, I Would Follow Thee.
“
I saw my do-ragged, dreadlocked student the next semesterafter he had earned an A in my classand called out to him from across the hallway. He saw me and his face lit up in a smile.
I crossed the hallway and pulled him into a hug.
Susan Elzey would love for you to buy her novel “Miracle of the Christmas Star” from Amazon.com or go to www.miracleofthechristmasstar.com for more information. Her weekly humor columns for the Danville (Virginia) Register & Bee may be viewed by Googling “7XMOM Elzey.”
JOctober 15, 2013
And what, exactly, is wrong with dreadlocks?