The Night School Life

Being a teacher in a night school program ensures that you will meet some interesting characters. My students come from a variety of different backgrounds and have had a wide range of life experiences. I had one student tell me that gun violence does not phase them any more because they have witnessed it so much firsthand. I have students who have experienced racism and bias all of their lives, so it comes as no real surprise that these young adults struggle with empathy because few have shown this humanistic trait to them firsthand. Many of them know only the violence, anger, and selfishness of others. Couple this with a program that oftentimes assumes that they are only troublemakers and truants from the outset, and you have a less than ideal situation on your hands.

Oftentimes I feel a war within me in my classroom. I don't want to send my students out for defiance and disrespect because I want to try to explain to them that they need to consider the thoughts and feelings of other students as well as my thoughts and feelings. I want them to know that I truly care about their education and actually use some of my resources to make sure that they have books and quality learning materials. At the same time, I can only lecture so much without sacrificing the needs of students who are utilizing their skills of empathy and who truly do want to use that time to learn.

On the flip side, there are those who treat many of the students with derision and disrespect. Whenever there is an after-school meeting, night school is cancelled. Why? Because others don't like the "night school kids" being there. When I come in to the school every Tuesday and Thursday, the teacher whose classroom I "borrow" is usually there finishing up her grading for the day. One evening I came in and she was searching frantically for some object--as she described it to me, she said "...I'm not saying it was a night school student, but..." Ironically, she ended up finding it because she had misplaced it.

These young adults are good people. They may act with rudeness and defiance at times--and cause my hair to gray prematurely--but in the end they are good people. I had a professor in college who explained the behavior of young adults who come into contact with the juvenile justice system in a very simple but profound way: he knocked on the board in the front of the classroom. He then explained that the juvenile's behavior could be likened to the sound waves emanating from the knock. The "knock," he explained, could be likened to events in the juvenile's life which had caused the "noise." These young adults have stories that could fill an entire library's worth of books. Unfortunately, few care to take the time to read these days.