I taught high school beginning in 1976, and except when my sons were little, I taught in private and then public schools until I almost-retired a few years ago. I am grateful forever that I fell into teaching, that I was honored to know and work with thousands of people, many of whom remain my friends. If some wondered if the hearts I sent on birthday greetings were sincere, I can say that every day tears come to my eyes when I think about my students. When they share joy I cheer; when they experience loss, I am saddened.

Most of what I recall about students is tender and delightful and cherished, but there are some incidents that still trouble me. Wednesday evening another high school teacher announced that she wanted to teach a class for future teachers with everything we were never taught in teacher training. We compared notes. 

We cannot save them all. We will make mistakes that haunt us. Students will ask questions we cannot answer and need help we are unqualified to give. Our students will die. They will die in car crashes and of drug overdoses. They will suicide. They will make horrific mistakes and never recover. 

They will test our ability to allow them to be wrong because that is how they want their world to be. It is not our right or responsibility to remake them in our image. When they seem gullible or cruel, I have to step away because it is not my place to stop them.

In a Junior Research Paper, many years ago, a student advocated for the slow death by torture of anyone convicted of a serious crime. That was how the thesis was written: People convicted of a serious crime should be slowly tortured to death. 

Hamid Debashi wrote an Op-Ed on Aljezzerra saying “What the US was doing to the world at large is what Americans now fear Trump might do to the US.”

“Liberal America is now scared that Trump will do to America what America has done to the world. It was just ‘foreign policy’ when America set up lunatic puppet dictators just like Trump to torture, maim, and murder their own people around the globe to protect its ‘national security interest’.

“It was just something ‘Daddy’ did at work. When he came home he was all good, kind, and cuddly—just like Obama. Now the Daddy is about to become a nasty, vicious, domestic abuser—like Trump.

“Trump is the poetic justice of the world. So long as America was only doing to the world at large what America now fears Trump may do to America, there was no outcry. There was consensus. The world deserved what America did to the world.”

Well. I guess the author is speaking to me. I hear him. I know that his outrage and anger are not without foundation. I have tried over the years, as gently as I could manage, to open the eye of students living in what has been a largely white and isolated Oregon community. 

Allow me to be clear. It is not my job to reinforce or alter the deeply held convictions of my students. It is a part of my job to help students understand that there are other people in the world who may not share their view. 

I asked the student with the the death-by-torture thesis for clarification: Define “slow.” At least two or three days. Define “serious crime.” Yes, the student meant the serial killer, but also the robber, mugger, and someone who holds up a bank. I took a breath and pointed out the obvious, that our Constitution forbids “cruel and unusual punishment” and that studies suggest about 1 in 20 murder convictions are in error, AND that the paper needed to address strong opposing positions. In the end, the paper acknowledged that sometimes mistakes are made and an innocent person might be tortured to death, but “that is the price you pay for living in America.” Those words. 

The completed paper followed the assignment. It was weak in either conceding or countering the opposing view, but the student completed required research, drafted, and finished with a good grade. I did not tell the student that the paper was horrifying, though I did confide this judgement to another teacher. 

I will never forget it. 

I was raised to believe in a different America. I was raised to believe that We the People, live together to protect and serve the general Welfare not only of today but of our Posterity. 

I still believe that. It is in our Constitution. And a final word about students who make “horrible mistakes and never recover”—the truth is that most do recover. They might wander in the desert for forty years and then find themselves someplace they never thought would be theirs. They hang on and hang on, and then one day realize they are safe and happy at last. Sometimes being lost is the only way we are found.