This fall, at forty-five, I started my first year as a high school teacher, ninth-grade English, in the same district where I once rocked two babies behind a library desk.
My students are, a lot of them, the uncounted.
Kids the system has quietly decided not to expect much from.
On the first day of every class, before anything else, I go around the room, and I look each one of them in the eye, and I ask them their name.
Not off the roster.
From them.
I make them say it out loud, and I say it back, and I tell them it’s nice to meet them.
Some of them look at me like I’ve handed them something far larger than a question.
I know that look now from both sides of it.
There’s a boy in my third-period class named Darnell who, on the first day, told me his name so quietly I had to ask twice.
