Lessons - May 25, 2010

I work as a tutor for Correctional Education (that’s a real state agency) in the pre-GED program. I help prepare other inmates to take and pass Virginia’s General Equivalency Diploma exam. Depending on which class period I’m in, I work with guys who read at less than a first grade level and don’t know their multiplication tables; other guys are at a high school level.



There are a lot of ironies in my current lifestyle. In my outside life I had graduated both college and law school. My then wife was a college professor with a PhD. My oldest son just graduated from a prestigious private liberal arts university. My youngest son has been taking piano lessons for seven years.


Strange, I feel a deep connection with these men and they have told instructors and the principal what a great teacher I am. The school even let me design and teach a creative writing class that now has a waiting list for the next year. I took education for granted then I came in here and watched men bust their butts to learn simple measurement concepts (like pints to quarts). My wife and I stressed education. My kids were expected to do well in school. So many of the guys in here never had the opportunities I had or my family had. Yet, to see the look on a 70 year old man’s face when he figures out Pythagoreans theorem on his own is astounding. To hear a 40 year old man read aloud from a Harry Potter book with a sense of pride and then tell you “I’ll be able to read to my grandkids” overwhelms.


I have a student – “Ryan” who is 25. He has been incarcerated since he was 12 years old (my youngest son’s age) for a joyride. While in a juvenile detention center, he was attacked and fought back, seriously injuring another juvenile offender. He has been locked up all but 8 months in the last 13 years. He still has 6 more years to go.


His family has abandoned him. He is completely alone. In all the time he has been locked up, no prison official ever saw fit to get this young man on track. He is bright, outgoing, and has barely a fifth grade education. His is a life that has been wasted; a life that is dangerously close to being permanently lost.


I look at Ryan and think of my youngest. He is so bright and full of life and a wonderful young man. From the moment I was arrested, he pitched in and began bearing more of the load at home.


I wonder how I was so blessed with such sons. I wonder how Ryan somehow missed out and how far off his life went at such an early age.


My boys were so disappointed in me following my arrest. I went from a wonderful husband and father in the blink of eye, I let them down. For my youngest, I simply wasn’t there anymore.


I spend every weekday working with these men in here so they have a chance at a better life when they get out. Is it penance for being a convicted embezzler? Yes, partly.


But, I also teach because I want my sons – my youngest especially – to one day look at me with pride that their father may have done something’s wrong, but at the end made a difference in some disadvantaged men’s lives.