Chapter 25
I felt sick. I was hosting holiday parties at the White House, so I had to go from seeing emails about my firing to groups of children belting out “Jingle Bells.” I was all festive energy and “Merry Christmas!” on the outside, but on the inside, I was mourning the loss of a job that I loved, and that I believed made a difference.
I admired my students so much. What they were going through to be in that classroom! They took nothing for granted. The last semester I was there, I had one student who was living in a motel room with her three kids. I found it heartbreaking when she dropped out halfway through the semester.
My students knew me as “Dr. B.” The only real evidence that I had another life was that they had to go through a metal detector to get into my classroom.
I worked with the Secret Service agents to create as much normalcy as possible.
They monitored the class on video from another room and had me wear a panic fob on a lanyard (I bedazzled it with stick-on jewels).
I loved teaching. One program I’d started at NOVA was the Women’s Retention Group.
Our goal was to help ease the special burdens on many women that kept them from succeeding at college—for example, the middle-aged woman returning to school after a divorce and having to navigate childcare, or the young woman with profound math anxiety who needed tutoring but wasn’t sure how to access it.
We arranged for space where women could nurse their babies, and we gave them access to mental health services.
There were benches outside where they could meditate surrounded by beautiful flowers.
One of my mentees was Roxy, a woman from Ukraine.
She’d tell me, “Dr. B., I was on the phone last night with my mom, and we were talking through the bombs.” There was a room on campus where the mentors and their mentees could have a cup of tea and just talk.
I had lunch with Roxy almost every month.
We still text. Some people come into your life and bring you joy when you least expect it.
Roxy is that person for me. I always look forward to seeing her and hearing all the challenges she’s taken on.
She’s wicked smart—and has a fabulous sense of style, right down to her five-inch platform heels.
I distinctly remember her first day walking into class in a short pink outfit, pink shoes, and pink hair.
She hasn’t changed in the many years I’ve known her.
Often on the first day of class, I told my students—there were usually twenty or twenty-two—we’d be doing a poetry assignment, and they’d all groan loudly.
Most of my students were going to school for tech jobs.
I taught a lot of nursing assistants, EMTs, IT majors—they were often coming to my classroom straight before or after dropping a child off at school or going to work, wearing scrubs or coveralls, trying to stay awake after working a night shift.
“A poem?” one whined, as if I’d told them to wash the windows.
Ignoring their protests, I said, “I’m going to read this poem to you, and I want you to talk about it.”
Then I shared the poem “Where I’m From,” by George Ella Lyon. It begins: “I am from clothespins, / from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride. / I am from the dirt under the back porch.”
We began to talk about where each student was from and what images they might use to represent their homelands—how they celebrated the holidays, what flowers grew in their gardens, what food their mothers made them when they were sick.
Then I had them write their own poems. While I had high hopes for their work, even I was so proud of the papers they turned in that week.
Their “I am from” poems were heartfelt and sparse, but powerful.
By incorporating all the senses, they conveyed the richness of their cultures, and the deep pride they took in their families and in how far they’d come.
“I’m from fried plantain and cassava dough, / whole wheat bread and tea.”
“I’m from the long deployments… I am from kids playing in streets, / walking to the shoppette and PX.”
“I come from freshly made tortillas.”
“I am… from where good was never good enough and big was never big enough.”
“I’m from where the first homo sapiens walked.”
“I am from posadas in January… I am first to step foot in college / from the ink on sturdy books.”
Reading these poems, I could feel my chest swell with admiration.
Beneath their grades (10/10!), I wrote words of encouragement like “You work hard in my class. You will be successful because you have guts and perseverance.” Every time I told my students that they would do well, it was almost as if I were trying to cast a spell on them: You WILL excel.
You WILL have a bright future. You WILL go far.
If only I could make that true by wishing for it.
The reality was they all had huge obstacles to overcome.
I spent as much time worrying about their home lives as about lesson plans.
I felt that it was my job to give them confidence and build them up.
At the next class after giving the poem assignment, I said, “Who wants to read their poem?” Hands shot up all around the room.
Inside of a week, they’d gone from hating the whole idea of a poem to wanting to read their own poetry in front of the class.
As each student finished reading, they’d startle to the sound of everyone clapping for them, and I’d see a huge smile spread over their face.
They seemed to feel so good about what they did.
In fact, during one class, the students notified me that they wanted to hang the poems up in the classroom.
Usually college classroom walls are bare, but I got out construction paper and tape and made a display out of the poems as if we were a kindergarten class that had just laminated fall leaves.
In that moment, we created community. Looking at the poems on the wall, somebody would say, “Hey, I’m from Peru, too!
” Or “My grandmother cooks the same dish!” From there, meaningful friendships grew.
Whatever the group’s makeup, it didn’t take long for the class to form a community.
Nobody was sitting there smirking or rolling their eyes.
When you teach English, you learn more about your students than you do teaching other subjects, I think.
They seemed to trust me, and in their journal assignments, they’d talk about going through a rough patch with a partner or finding themselves unexpectedly pregnant.
One student who had been in foster care came to class and cried every single day.
She had no one. She’d come to Virginia with her boyfriend, who then broke up with her.
She struggled to stay in school. My class’s writing tutor, Paula, took her under her wing.
She invited her to her home for holidays and helped her manage the educational system.
All it took was one person who cared about and mentored her through the rough times.
It took her several years to get her degree, but she did it.
She moved to Texas with her new boyfriend, and now she has a whole extended family that loves her. Thanks in no small part to Paula.
Teachers have so much to do every minute, but somehow they manage to give that kind word or compliment that brightens a student’s day.
It says, You’re special. You can do this.
You have to know how. That’s what we do as teachers.
It’s all about building confidence, listening, supporting, and providing a space for them to make connections.
I watched every year as they’d start to trust one another. As I packed up my bag at the end of class, I loved to hear them reach out to one another: “Would you like a ride to the bus?” “Can I call you to talk through the homework?”
For another journal assignment, I said, “If a meteor was heading toward the earth and you had five minutes left, what would be the last song you’d want to hear?
” They’d have to think about that and then write about their song.
I let them share their songs and explain their choice to the class.
They loved that assignment, perhaps in part because it gave them permission to blast music in school.
My meteor song showed my age—it was the gentle hymn “Be Not Afraid,” a song that Beau loved.
The chorus promises: “I go before you always / Come, follow me and I will give you rest.” To me, that was far more soothing a possible final song than the window-rattling ones they chose, but I suppose in an apocalypse scenario the heart wants what it wants.
I kept my life as a political spouse separate from my life on campus, with very rare exceptions.
In 2019, I went on Trevor Noah’s show. For years, I’d been teaching his memoir, Born a Crime, and we had group discussions about his childhood in South Africa and how he had developed resilience.
And in 2010, I was asked to introduce Barack Obama when he spoke on campus about a bill designed to fix issues with the ACA and with the student loan system.
The students seemed to forgive me for those two moments of worlds colliding.
In the end, the issue that had led to my termination was easily resolved, and I kept my position. I didn’t want to create a problem with the faculty, so I only told one or two other people at the school.
When I see former students now, whether running into them out in the world or via photos and texts they still send me regularly, I’m often taken aback.
They’re so old. Some of my students who were just out of high school when I taught them are now middle-aged!
In my memory, they’re still fresh-faced college kids.
Every time I hear one of their meteor songs, I think of the thousands of students I taught over the years—and how they made me laugh.
Whatever else was happening in the world or in the rest of my life, teaching truly brought me joy.
Every day, I miss the structure of teaching, and I miss my students.
I taught my last class at NOVA in December 2024.
Disappointingly, after I left, school administrators said that all students had to be included in NOVA’s Women’s Retention Group, including men, and the mission of the group became so diluted that it no longer served the same purpose.
At least the garden remains to this day, with female professors still dragging out the hoses regularly to tend to it.
After teaching for more than half my life, it was a hard decision to leave.
It was so strange knowing that after forty years, I was walking away from the classroom, maybe for the last time.
Fortunately, fate brought me the perfect ending to my teaching career.
As I’ve said, what I tried to do most of all was give my students confidence.
I learned that a young man in the class, a bassist, had to give a concert to raise money for his music class, and he was petrified.
A boxer named Archie Moore once said, “I ride my fear like a fast horse.” I knew that the student just needed to get on the horse and it would carry him through.
I suggested he use our class as a rehearsal.
I had him come in as if it was the event, and with the class’s support, I coached him through it.
“This is so exciting for us to hear you do this!” I told him.
He’d been dragging his bass into the classroom every day. It was like another member of the class. We were thrilled that he’d be sharing his talent with us, and that we could possibly help him get over his nerves.
As soon as he finished the classical piece, we erupted into applause and cheers.
The young man looked dazed. He grew visibly taller, almost as if he were a parched plant being watered.
He left to go and give his concert with more confidence than he would have had otherwise.
My work was done. I turned off the lights in the classroom and walked out into the next chapter of my life.