Keisha - Smiling

Nearly fifteen years ago, I was asked to teach a special study skills course to a special group of students.  I was intrigued by the challenge, and I wanted to test the efficacy of some new learning theories I was developing.  I learned that the class was in a cohort, a learning community, and that I would be teaching them study skills applied to psychology. They were seventeen seventeen year old black students who had low entrance scores, and had not been very successful in high school.  I was set for the experience.

The first morning of the class, I was walking down the hall still composing my initial remarks when I noticed they had put us in a small, narrow classroom. I knew how crowded it would be before I opened the door.  There would be seventeen young students sitting around a rectangular set of tables, with only a few feet from their backs to the four walls, I was not pleased.  I opened the door, walked in, and was startled with what I found - all the students were there, crammed around the tables, none of them smiling, with the lights off.  It was an inauspicious start.

I did turn the light on, called roll, and started to teach.  Several of them, but not all, warmed up a bit, and the class went smoothly. I was pleased that many of them seemed to wake up and respond to me, but I did notice one young woman from the start, Keisha - she sat in the corner with a large hat on, frowning throughout the lecture.  I was a little irritated to tell the truth, and I supposed I chalked it up to a bad attitude, one that might take me a long time to crack, if I ever managed to.  For the next three sessions, she didn't move and only spoke if I asked her a direct question.  She wasn't hostile, but she wasn't very friendly either.

During the third week of class, I assigned a letter as homework, as was my custom.  I told them to tell me anything they would like me to know, and that it would be confidential.  I always enjoyed reading these notes from my students, as I learned a great deal more about them.  I would then answer them, and we would exchange this informal information throughout the term.  Keisha's letter caught me off guard:  It was long, written beautifully, and full of her hopes and desires.  Initially I thought I had gotten the name wrong, surely that couldn't be from the morose, sour student in the big hat in the corner.  But it was.

Keisha wrote about being a writer, a computer engineer, getting out of her neighborhood, living a new and exciting life.  She also mentioned many of the things we had learned in the first two weeks, and she applied them very astutely to her psychology class. I wrote her back an equally long letter, and I noticed she had perked up and was now sitting at the table the next class period.  Somewhere midway through the lecture, I called  her out, teasing her gently. She looked at me for a second then smiled, broadly and beautifully, with a pencil thick gap between her front teeth.  Later she would tell me she didn't smile a lot, for obvious reasons (I didn't think they were obvious), and that many people mistook her demeanor for apathy and disrespect.  

I paid a lot more attention to Keisha from that point on.  She was by far the best student I had ever had in a study skills course, and she enthusiastically applied everything I taught her.  She had been a C student in high school, and she was now grinding out As on all her other assignments.  She continued to write me, sometimes sharing her poetry, sometimes telling me she was making an effort to get to know her other instructors and that they were responding nicely. Keisha was coming out of her shell. 

Keisha breezed through my class and her psychology course, as well as all her others.  By the end of the term, I convinced Keisha to go to two state educational conferences to help me make presentations about the experimental course and it theories.  She was nervous at first, but then she agreed, going on to steal the show at each event.  The conference goers were very impressed with her, and stayed afterwards to ask her questions.  I was very, very proud of her. 

Keisha graduated in a little over four years with a degree in Computer Engineering, graduating summa cum laude, and I was at her graduation watching as she walked across the stage smiling joyfully.  She went on to do an internship and eventually to a great job.  To this day, I still remember her sitting back in that corner, perhaps daring me to come and help pull her out.  I take a small amount of credit for her success, but not too much.  I was in the right place at the right time, and stumbled on the right student.  Sometimes God lines things up nicely,  people too.