“Mr. A” you may not know this but you changed my life.

Twenty-four years ago when I walked into your eighth-grade classroom I wasn’t quite sure what to make of you – you were just so damn happy and excited to be there with us. I wondered if you knew the backstory on our class and whether you might have been duped into teaching us.

After all, it was our class that had literally sent our first sixth-grade teacher to a mental institution after we caused her to have a complete breakdown in class. Her daughter who subsequently stepped in and thought she could make a difference was also quickly dispatched. We burned through a total of five teachers that year. It became a badge of honor – we were the bad kids that nobody wanted to teach.

Yet, there you stood, wearing a crisp-white dress shirt and a goofy-tie – smiling ear to ear. You walked up to each of us and introduced yourself and addressed us either “sir” or “ma’am.” I genuinely think that you caught us completely off-guard with that approach. None of us had ever been addressed with that level of respect.

Still, you were not going to get a pass just because you were nice – they all started out nice. I remember thinking that you looked and sounded like Sylvester Stallone. My peers obviously saw it as well since it was not long before we were cracking “Yo, Adrian!” jokes behind your back. To your credit, you rolled with the punches when you caught us and even played along. Although the ladies in our class were a tough bunch, you won the guys over pretty quickly.

Somewhere during that awkward first-few weeks of getting acquainted with one another a funny thing happened – we started to trust you because you genuinely believed in us. You held us to a pretty-high standard and didn’t buy our shit when we slacked. We respected you for that.

Nowhere was your belief in us more apparent than when you wanted to teach us William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the district refused to buy the books for us because they thought that it would have been a waste of money. You didn’t tow the party line and sugar coat it for us – you were brutally honest with us and passionately told us about the district not believing in us. You told us that you would buy the books with your own money and that we would prove district administrators wrong. I don’t know if you knew this then, but the best way to motivate kids like us was to tell us that we couldn’t do something.

I’m not going to lie and say that it was easy, but you managed to break Shakespeare down for us in ways to which we could relate. He wasn’t just some weird, old, white guy that talked really funny – he was a storyteller that was writing about family-rivalries and vengeance, forbidden-love and power-grabs – themes that kids from the ‘hood could relate to because we lived them.

Not only did we read the entire book and write essays but you actually organized a play for our school where we actually memorized and acted several scenes. I seem to recall some district administrators being in attendance and wonder if you ever got your chance to say “I told you so.” Either way – you earned our respect.

I vividly remember that as the year drew to a close I was notified that I was the valedictorian for our school and that I would be giving a speech at the district graduation alongside the valedictorians from other schools. Our theme was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech and I jumped into writing my speech immediately. When I was done I proudly brought it to you for review confident that you would be impressed – you were clearly not. You looked at me and said that it was good and that you would have been impressed had any other student in our class written it but that you expected more from me. You asked me if this really was my best effort, and that gave me a lot to think about. Despite being valedictorian I never felt that I had to try that hard, I did enough to get the best grade in the class but I never really pushed myself to see what I was really capable of achieving.

I scrapped that initial effort and diligently went about writing a new speech – a speech that conveyed my authentic voice and that led me to seek a much deeper appreciation of the power of Dr. King’s words. I brought it back to you and sat nervously as you read it expecting you to break out your red pen – but you didn’t. Instead, you looked at me and smiled saying that this is what you expected of me all along. Then you asked something unexpected that no one had ever asked – you asked me if I had thought about college. I said that my uncle was a gardener at Stanford University and that it seemed like a good school but that it was for rich white kids. You were a recent Stanford graduate and pounced on that. You told me that if I wanted to go to Stanford, I could go to Stanford and you said it with such conviction that I believed you. You also said that if I graduated from Stanford you would be there to see me get my diploma. I know that I joked about not really being able to go to Stanford, partly because I didn’t believe that I could but mainly because I didn’t want to allow myself to believe that this was actually a real possibility.

After my time at James B. Flood Elementary ended, we managed to keep in touch on occasion but I never really told you how much having you as a teacher changed my life. You were the first teacher to inspire me and to encourage me to find my voice. You were the one that encouraged me to accept a private school scholarship where I received an amazing education. You were the one that encouraged me to apply to Stanford and you were the first person I thought of when I received my acceptance letter.

Finally, in June of 2001 as I walked down the aisle to receive my diploma, you were there in the audience – you kept your word. Words could never adequately express how much that meant to me. To this day, I still have the portfolio that you gave me that day and I still have not torn out that first page where you provided one last lesson in the way of a quote that still motivates me today:

“Keep two truths in your pocket and take them out according to the need of the moment. Let one be ‘For my sake the world was created.’ And the other: ‘I am dust and ashes.’”

Thank you Mr. A.

As a former college admissions officer I often struggled mightily with the notion of what defines a well-rounded student. Think about it for a second, isn’t the very notion of trying to create a definition for this based on our ingrained biases? Yet, across thousands of higher education institutions, admissions officers make acceptance decisions based on this concept.

In our discussions with regard to considering admission to applicants we addressed items like grades, test-scores, recommendations and of course extra-curricular activities. We took a formulaic approach to these points without giving much consideration to things like grade-inflation, standardized test bias, phony recommendations and students merely padding a resume. To me this process always felt like we were not getting to know students authentically and nowhere was this more pronounced that when dealing with first-generation students.

You see, when our society talks about first-generation college students I feel like we do so with a deserved sense of admiration but without a real understanding of what these students have gone through in order to reach the point of applying to college. I think that a large part of this is because our society does not want to fully pull back the veil and really know the truth because it does not conform to the standard of what we value. Take extra-curricular activities as just one example.

Our society places a great deal of value in extra-curricular participation – athletics, student government, clubs and community service. We impart value on the notion of a student taking the onus to use their free-time for these endeavors. We hold these students in high-regard – and as a reflection of society so does the college admissions process. I agree that there is a lot to be said about commitment for these students.

Yet, I ask myself do we place the same value on those responsibilities that preoccupy the time of many of our first-generation college applicants. Where on an application can Esmeralda address the fact that she babysat her three siblings every night while her parents worked and yet still maintained a 3.8 GPA? Where can James talk about working after-school every day to help his parents pay the rent? Where can Elisa talk about coming home every day to take care of her ailing mother?

Of course they can address these challenges on their essay but the point is that our system does not recognize these students in the same way. You would be hard-pressed to find many admissions officers that would say that they see a student taking care of their siblings every night in the same way as a another who is student body president, but I challenge you to really look at what responsibilities each of these entails and ask yourself which might result in a better-rounded student.

I understand that it is always a challenge to view the world from a different perspective but I am asking you to. Let’s work together to tell first-generation students that we value their experiences as much as students with ten extra-curricular activities on their resume. Let’s give them the opportunity to showcase who they really are and what they can bring to our institutions. This is not an issue of trying to balance the scales, it is an issue of understanding that our view of the balance is distorted.

I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences as it relates to this or any topic of educational equity so please add your comments here or any of the social media platforms above.

I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences as it relates to this or any topic of educational equity so please add your comments here or any of the social media platforms above.