The minutes before you arrive...

Before you enter the class, I sit here in anticipation, wondering what new lesson you will have to teach me.  It happens every class.  Some of the lessons are small and some of the lessons are a little more obvious in there profundity and immediacy.  Some of the lessons you teach me frankly hit me across the head like a 2x4.  For now the classroom lies in beautiful stillness before erupting into the chaos that is undergraduate energy.  In that stillness I remember.  I think about my student this quarter who shared with me that she crossed the border, undocumented, at the age of three with parents determined to give her an education.  She is now in a graduate program, the first in her family to attend college, let alone get an upper level university degree.  I think about my student at the community college who suffers through an illness that daily affects his life and yet he perseveres and moves us all through his thoughtful prose and surprising humor, never missing a class.  I think about the students who take on the task of timing speeches for me and taking on extra projects though they are not actually in my class or getting any credit for it, just because they like to think and work.  I think about that girl, semesters ago now, who came out to me and then shyly, yet proudly, introduced me to her girlfriend.  Your smile was priceless. The endless bravery that marches through these classrooms, that sits at these desks and that leaves one in awe.  So many of you holding down not one, but often two or three jobs while attending school and sometimes even raising families.  Some of you, years older than many of the other students, re-committing to an education that years ago you had to let go of because of family obligations, illness or simply life diversions.  Dreams resurrected.  Bravery of the kind that humbles a person, brings her to her knees, grateful that the world has such folks in it.  It is the bravery of such students that helps ease the pain of the ones that are more careless or even thoughtless, sometimes cruel.  One young man, two semesters ago, fresh out of gang life, struggling with emotional demons both in and out of class, completed my class with a passing grade because he made a commitment to himself.  He wasn't a star speaker but he was a star in my eyes, even after his outbursts.  You will likely never know how much you restored in me the commitment to fight what is cruel outside and inside all of us.  To never give up the rush of an afternoon workout session just because you can, because you've made the space in your life for new experiences and new ways of doing things.  Your struggle I hope to always honor.  

I love having this time, pre-class, in the solitariness of a room waiting, expectant for more of you to rush in to teach me.  I love having this time to contemplate the honor of working with you.  Please keep going, don't give up because I know I haven't.  I may seem short with you some days or not as appreciative as I should be, but I do notice and, in quiet moments such as I have right now, I remember.