I did my student teaching at a high school forty minutes from our house, terrified, forty-two years old, standing in front of thirty teenagers on a prosthetic leg, certain they would eat me alive.
They did not.
It turns out that a man who has carried a burning nineteen-year-old out of a vehicle is not afraid of a room full of sixteen-year-olds, and it turns out that teenagers, who can smell fear and fakery from across a parking lot, will follow a person who is simply, unshakably real.
My first year, there was a kid named Marcus, fifteen, angry, headed nowhere good, the kind of kid teachers quietly give up on because giving up is easier.
He reminded me of a dozen nineteen-year-olds I’d known, scared underneath the anger, convinced nobody was coming for him.
So I went back for him, the only way a teacher can, which is slowly, and without being asked, and more times than seemed reasonable.
