What My Students Taught Me

Sixth-grade teacher Elvalisa Guzman often sees parents fade into the background at her Chicago public school of mostly Mexican immigrants. They often assume they can’t do much to help academically. But through one quiet student, Guzman comes to appreciate the unseen power of unconditional parental love. This episode was produced in partnership with The Teacher Project and WBEZ.

When Ericka Mingo went from teaching high school to teaching adults at National Louis University, she thought her new students would need less from her. She realized every student, regardless of age, needs to know their teachers are there for them. This episode was produced in partnership with the Teacher Project and WBEZ.

Everything in Rebekah Ozuna’s classroom is designed for the little bodies and fast-firing neurons of 3- and 4-year-olds. Tiny chairs. A carpet for story time. Colorful bins full of blocks and toys. Even the windows are low to the ground so her students can see outside. Ozuna teaches in an inclusive special education setting at Knox Early Childhood Education Center on San Antonio’s South Side. Half of her students have disabilities; half don’t. Two years ago, one of her students, Naomi Campos, made the teacher take a closer look at her priorities. She realized that sometimes the way she taught didn’t fit her students, as well as her classroom, does. This episode was produced in partnership with the Teacher Project, Texas Standard, and public radio stations across Texas.

Perhaps the hardest part of being a high school teacher is seeing students drop out or fail to graduate. In her second year teaching at Grand Prairie High School, Rebecca Dodd formed a special connection with student Cheyenne Musgrave. "She was a student that just captured my heart right off," Dodd says. "She reminded me so much of one of my own children." When Cheyenne withdrew from school on her 18th birthday, Dodd took it hard. But the story didn't end there. This episode was produced in partnership with the Teacher Project, Texas Standard and public radio stations across Texas.

When Lotus Hoey started teaching English as a second language a few years ago, she felt right at home. Her own parents immigrated from China, so she had to learn English at school, too. “Initially, when I first started school, I did not speak any English at all. I only spoke Cantonese Chinese and as I was growing up, it was difficult for me to continually translate for my parents who spoke no English,” Hoey says. When her students come to Pershing Middle School in Houston from places like Central America, the Philippines and Sudan, Hoey can relate to them pretty easily. Or at least, she could, until she met Emiliano Campos. This episode was produced in partnership with Teacher Project, Texas Standard and public radio stations across Texas.

Karen Sowers was a young, idealistic history teacher at Lakeview High School in Garland, Texas when she met Donald Pierson. Donald was charming and charismatic, but completely uninterested in school. For years, Karen thought he was her biggest failure. But, long after Donald left her class, an unexpected encounter taught Karen she’d shaped Donald’s life in ways she couldn’t have imagined. This story was produced in partnership with Texas Standard.

Sandy Lyons heard about Da’Keondrick Whitley a long time before he set foot in her second-grade classroom at Presidential Meadows Elementary School in Manor, Texas, northeast of Austin. She learned to look past his reputation, and search for his hidden gifts. This episode was produced in partnership with Texas Standard.

Teacher Jerome White knew from the first moment he met Donald Meyer that the student was a math whiz—and that Meyer was very aware of his natural abilities. White struggled in his first year teaching Donald pre-calculus at New Orleans’ Lusher High School to convince the student to focus in class, do his homework, or recognize that he might have something to learn. “It wasn’t a malevolent act on his part,” White says. But he “seemed to think he was above it all.” Nonetheless, Donald earned good grades, and after several months of teaching the student, White felt like they hit something of a stride. That was a good thing: White taught all of Lusher’s most advanced pre-calculus and calculus classes, and he knew that he would likely have Donald in class for three straight years. Donald’s junior year went fairly smoothly, and he aced his first Advanced Placement Calculus exam. But by the start of the student’s senior year, everything changed dramatically. Donald was wrestling with a lot of problems outside of

At first, the Philadelphia high-school student Valentina Love Salas was not exactly excited about taking African American history, a required course for graduation. She had heard that the class was depressing. She had also suffered from racist taunts and bullying in the past—painful experiences that made her reluctant to speak her mind in a class focused on issues of race and identity. Her teacher, Ismael Jimenez, was accustomed to at least some amount of student disinterest or reticence. “A lot of the students you … can kind of see the glaze over their eyes,” he said. But as the school year continued, and Jimenez incorporated videos, music, and texts that intrigued Valentina, the student found herself growing more and more engaged. “Music really resonates with me, and every chance he got he put a song on or a music video that really explained what he was trying to teach us,” Valentina recalled. Before the school year ended, however, a classroom blow-up over one student’s incendiary comment would create

When Jessica Carlson agreed to teach English in an alternative program for at-risk students eight years ago in Colorado Springs, she knew that she would have her hands full. But she wasn’t prepared for Kim Hardy. Hardy, new to the school and state, resented being in the alternative program and bristled at Carlson’s sunny demeanor. Hardy turned every classroom interaction into a battle, and made Carlson dread coming to school. There were the times Hardy led the class in defiant sing-alongs of Juvenile’s “Back That Ass Up”; the day she and classmates superglued Carlson’s dry-erase markers to the board; and her proclivity for calling Carlson a “bitch.” Hardy calmed down when Carlson gave the student more challenging work, and Carlson survived the year. But they hardly became close, and when school let out in the spring Carlson expected that she would never see Hardy again. That’s why, about four years later, she was stunned to see a Facebook message pop up from the former student. That unexpected outreach t

The Student Whose Silence Transformed My Teaching by Columbia Journalism School's Teacher Project

In his first year teaching history at Shady Side Academy, a small private school in Pittsburgh, Matt Weiss was determined to be the “fun” teacher. A natural performer, he went off on long tangents, shared stories from the weekend, and sometimes played guitar during class. Most students encouraged him. But Kate Schelbe, a junior in his U.S. history class, was not impressed with his antics. She sat stone-faced while other students laughed. A reserved and serious student, she made sacrifices to attend the school and wanted every second of class time to count. “I didn’t need the warm-up,” she recalls. “I didn’t need the warm, fuzzy connection. I just was chomping at the bit ready to dive into history.” Weiss vividly remembers the “censorious and scary” look in Schelbe's eyes when he goofed around or went off topic. Over time, those looks would force him to consider some of his blind spots as a teacher, and contemplate some serious change.

In parts of New Orleans, Michael Ricks is a legendary educator — known for his full girth and even fuller heart. Most people just call him “Big Mike.” For years, Mike’s formal title was academic and behavioral interventionist, although in practice he serves as a combination between disciplinarian, social worker, and friend. Mike met Cyril, one of his most memorable students, at the middle school where he worked in the years before Hurricane Katrina struck the city. They reunited after the storm at New Orleans’ O. Perry Walker High School, where Cyril’s friendly antics could usually elicit a laugh from the veteran educator. Over time, Mike worried increasingly about Cyril getting involved in the drug scene near the city’s Calliope Projects, where the student lived. So as leader of the school’s Color Guard team (where Cyril was a member) Mike gave the student more and more tasks and responsibilities — all in an effort to keep him out of trouble and away from the drug scene near his home. Mike breathed a sig

During the first few weeks that Ashley Lamb-Sinclair taught 15-year-old Connor Cummings’ sophomore English class, the two of them had a great rapport. But their relationship changed dramatically a few months later, when Lamb-Sinclair returned from maternity leave. It was 2012, an election year, and the teacher started getting pushback from some students at North Oldham High School, located in a Louisville, Kentucky suburb, about her liberal leanings. Connor was a ringleader of the resistance. On one memorable occasion he erupted during a heated class discussion, shouting something along the lines of, “Liberals like you are ruining the country.” All of Lamb-Sinclair’s efforts to talk through differences with Connor that year proved in vain. It wasn’t until years had passed that the two of them had a frank discussion about what had transpired in the classroom that spring. And Lamb-Sinclair learned that, for Connor, the outbursts and rage were about far more than politics.

As a young teacher, Ingrid Chung saw herself in 12-year-old Kayshaun Brown. “What I saw in Kayshaun was the same type of intelligence, rebellious streak, and desire to go against authority that I had as a high-school student,” she says. Chung first taught Kayshaun, who goes by Kay, in her seventh-grade English classroom at the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science in the South Bronx. That year went smoothly enough. Kay was bright, lively, and charismatic. And because of their instant rapport, Chung could get the boisterous Kay to behave when some of her colleagues could not. But as Kay grew, so did his capacity for troublemaking. By the time he started the 10th grade at Urban Assembly, the teen often skipped school, disrupted class, and swore at his teachers. Chung grew increasingly concerned that he would drift away, and that she would lose him. This is the story of her efforts to keep Kay in school. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/the-student-who-almost-got-away/535

Chris Zajac’s story epitomizes the mundane heroics of school teaching. The author Tracy Kidder spent a year following Zajac in the late 1980s, when she was a fifth-grade teacher in an economically depressed section of Holyoke, Massachusetts, known as The Flats. The result was the bestselling Among Schoolchildren, a book that documented in intimate detail the struggles of a teacher who would not give up on her most challenging students. Those included Clarence, a sweet-faced preteen who wreaked havoc in her classroom on a daily basis: flipping over chairs, interrupting lessons, bullying other students. No amount of scolding and cajoling seemed to make a difference. (Kidder changed the children’s names in the book to protect their identities, so Clarence is not the student’s real name.) The school year came to a dramatic climax when a team of education specialists had to decide whether to keep Clarence in Zajac’s classroom or send him to an alternative program for troubled students. Zajac had deeply conflic