Last week I had dinner with a former colleague, and we caught up on all the gossip: who was doing great at college, who had had a baby, who had come out of the closet, who had won a scholarship, who had suffered a great tragedy. Finding out where life has taken my former students is a great joy, especially for being so rare. My favorite run-in has to be the year I took a few students to the Rainbow/PUSH conference downtown. At lunch, they handed out the NAACP scholarships for that year, and who should be on the list but Darius, a boy who was possibly the greatest challenge of my challenging first year teaching 8th grade. This was a boy who had impersonated his mother when I tried to call home, whose mother had threatened to sue me, who threw temper tantrums in class, who wrote inappropriate essays just to see what I'd do. And yet, when I saw him after the awards ceremony, he was so happy to see me and we had a wonderful talk. He had grown up, had found ways to survive the chaos at home and no longer take it out on those around him, had channeled his energies into getting a full scholarship to college. I was reminded of these conversations when I was referred to these fascinating articles, which Alexander Russo refers to as time-lapse journalism: Young and Restless: Follow the 13-year journey of 23 Harlem kindergartners. Pieces of an educational dream: Twenty years ago, a stranger made a stunning offer to an entire class of sixth graders: A free college education. Some triumphed, others faltered. So, how about your students? Where are they now?

Labels: conversations