A Look Inside

I have a friend who teaches English at an inner city high school. Most of his students are at or below the poverty line and his classroom and the school are often left wanting for supplies. His heart is to help teach these kids to see beyond their circumstances and to believe that what seems impossible is actually possible if they’ll drive hard enough after it.

He’s always looking for new and creative ways to teach his students along those lines and recently stumbled on an idea that is truly unique and inspiring. He has found that he gets his students’ best work when he personalizes their assignments. A recent assignment required the students to write an essay about a great dining experience they’ve had. The results he got back amazed and saddened him. It wasn’t the quality of their work, or lack thereof, that impacted him so strongly, but rather the content of it.

The large majority of his students wrote about fast food restaurants. They praised the juiciness of the chicken nuggets or the tastiness of their hamburgers.

While this is somewhat humorous it is also heavily disheartening. For many of these students their only, therefore their nicest, dining experiences have been fast food. Take a second to think of your nicest dining experience and then compare it to what these kids have been limited to. It’s astounding that what would be for us as a daily option of decent food such as Chili’s, Friday’s or Olive Garden would be by far the nicest meal that most of these kids would ever have had.

So my friend was moved to do something about it. He first crafted his plan. The idea came to him to find a way to provide these kids with a dining experience at a nice restaurant unlike anything they had previously experienced. The goal of the experience would be to open their eyes to a world beyond their poverty and the possibilities that lied therein. He decided then that he would use the dining experience as a reward for achievements in his class. From there he began contacting a series of local fine dining establishments in hopes that they would cut him a break on their prices for the benefit of the students. (You can imagine that an inner city teacher’s salary isn’t going to pay for a classroom of kids to have a high-end meal.) He also sent out support letters to ask for friends and family to be a part of this effort by donating the funds necessary to allow these kids to have this experience.

As I talked with my friend about how his idea was coming together I found myself inspired by him. Here is a man who is so moved by the plight of those around him that he wants to find a way to teach and inspire them to achieve in a way that isn’t in the curriculum that is provided for him and wasn’t a part of his degree training. He also thought it would be a good idea to take some of his friends along so that his students could meet other people, professionals, and talk with them about what they do. He extended an invite to me and I quickly took him up on it. So next month I get to sit with this teacher and up to four of his students at dinner and I get the honor of being inspired by them.

It struck me that in much the same way he was using this dinner as an opportunity to teach them about life I had an opportunity in meeting them to hopefully do the same somehow. I thought about leaving them with something like a book, something that would be an easy read, but might inspire and challenge them to think (Seth Godin’s Tribes came to mind for example). I ran it by my friend and while he thought it would be a good idea to give them something, he didn’t think it likely a book would get read.

What do you think? What can I leave these students with that they might be able to go back to when the challenges of their life are discouraging them. Something that will remind them that if they continue to work hard and persevere, they will achieve great things. Leave me a comment with your idea.