LIFE

Writing Out of the Shadows

Who nudges you to realize your potential?

There are people out there who will see your potential unlike any other. Find them. Photo by Tina Bosse on Unsplash.

This essay discusses the film Finding Forrester. Apologies for the spoilers.

Sixteen-year-old Jamal Wallace is a bibliophile. A voracious reader of prose and poetry, he downplays his gift for writing to exude a public persona that he is just like a regular black kid from the Bronx. He writes when no one is watching, and when in full view of others, he dribbles his basketball like a security blanket, discusses with an exaggerated casualness about hip-hop music and the New York Yankees.

In his young mind, this is perhaps as good as it gets — until his high school teacher reveals to his mother that Jamal’s test scores show high potential.

Not only is Jamal offered a scholarship to enter a prestigious private school, Jamal is set to do greater and bigger things. Jamal is flattered about the opportunity as he sees his hard working mother happy. Yet he has unsettling feelings. How will this affect his life as he knows it? The question is, is this what Jamal wants?

For the first fourteen years of my life as a teacher, I taught at an elite university. While the salary was nothing to shout about, the students, on the other hand, drove their parents’ BMW to campus.