little things or missed some of the big ones

There are other stories about Clinton, the kind you don’t tell at funerals. There’s so many stories about how a kid like him that was white would have been given room to explore his brightness rather than being asked to perform his intelligence on command. There’s stories about how we tried to control Clinton, to quiet Clinton, to make Clinton conform.

I was part of this problem. I had Clinton every year 4th-8th grade in my advisory, and then taught him all of his 8th grade year. I taught him some years in high school too, but honestly can’t remember which years he was in my room because he was supposed to be there and which ones he was just hanging out or hiding among the students pretending he was supposed to be there. I’d eventually catch him, call him out. He’d flash that same smile, that exact same one, give me a “k see ya” on his way to some other place he was probably not supposed to be.

Clinton was kind of always in trouble, wore it comfortably as he walked around, but usually just the harmless kind of trouble. His instinct to not get in trouble seemed to always kick in just after he did the something wrong. When students got their own laptops in 8th grade, it took Clinton less than a day to break through the school internet firewall and create his own admin log-in for his machine. In high school, he was accessing and changing his grades for lord knows how long, only getting caught when he started doing it for his friends and anyone else who asked nice.

There were months there after that, maybe more, when Clinton wasn’t allowed to use technology at school, and then only under direct supervision with limits.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot today, about how we took this thing that he was so, so good at and took it away. After years of proving to us that punishments did not alter his behavior, we removed his ability to get into the kind of trouble we wanted to punish and left it at that.

I think any teacher would tell you that when we lose a student, for any reason, that punch of loss is followed immediately by another of regret. There are all the things we did or didn’t do or could or should have done. There are moments we cared too much about little things or missed some of the big ones.