I had a cool job at New World School of the Arts.  Some of the best students I’ll ever meet were in my classes.  But I heard that the Woz was teaching high school, so I went into that, thinking it would be similar.  Ha ha ha on me.  It’s not.

In a high school setting, you encounter people that college filters out.  Those who might have been something; had a better, easier, not so grindingly painful life, but are not…but for you.  You can make a difference in a way college teachers can’t (I teach college during the summer vacations).

What am I getting at?

Who is this person? What happened to him?

This photograph really bothers me.  This is maybe a ten-year-old boy whose life is set in stone at an early age.  This picture was taken in 1938.  My father was that age in 1938.  He picked cotton for a dollar a day.  Like my father, the boy in the photo is most probably dead, but what kind of life did he lead?  Was it decided what his path would be this early?  My dad joined the service after WWII and then left the lumberjack trade, the trade of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, to become a traveling salesman.  My pa could talk a squirrel out of a tree.  Who knows what he could have accomplished if he’d encountered a teacher along the way who saw that ability as a sign of a keen intelligence?

That kid in the cranberry crops.  Why is a ten year-old picking berries in the hot sun?  What kind of beast employed children to line their coffers?  This little boy made pennies a day to pick produce.  He did not thrive doing this.

That’s my point.  Children should thrive, and live in conditions where that is possible.  To do that, they must be educated early, and opportunities should be open to them that are not contingent on their parents’ ability to foot the bill.  We have that in place in this country now, but methinks we must be vigilant in order that the old days not return.  Hell, let’s not pretend.  The fields of the South are full of migrant children who are undereducated today.

These children from the past haunt me, for I know they did not fulfill their purpose.  The wizened faces I’ve seen were once these children, and what wonders might have been if they’d had the chance to contemplate something deeper than bushel baskets?

That’s why I might look back fondly on my time teaching in a really good art school, but then those kids that might have ended up without recourse but for a teacher taking notice…

I’ll be okay.