Book Club — The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates

Second discussion guide for our book club read

Join The Teachers Guild Book Club in reading Wes Moore’s gripping and insightful tale: The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates, which is the true story of two men with the same name, born a year apart, in the same Baltimore neighborhood, who grow up to have vastly different fates. One Wes, the author, becomes a Rhodes Scholar, White House Fellow, and decorated combat veteran, while the other is incarcerated and serving a life sentence for a robbery gone wrong, which he participated in at age seventeen. The book chronicles each man’s journey and their relationship over the years as they reflect upon the circumstances — individual and systemic — that led to the different outcomes of their lives.

The Questions

(Q1) When Wes Moore the author goes off to Valley Forge Military Academy, he remarks on the cultural changes he experiences and the paradigm shift which this provokes for him:

“It was a different psychological environment, where my normal expectations were inverted, where leadership was honored and class clown were ostracized.” pg. 97

In sharp (and heartbreaking) contrast, when the other Wes Moore moves from Baltimore City to the county, he notes that:

“Life in the county was deceptively green and quiet — but he soon discovered that the hood came in different shapes and sizes.”

In other words, while he’s changed physical surroundings, the psychological environment remains the same and so do his reference points. We’d love to hear your own thoughts and stories on the differences between psychological and physical environments. Does one have more of an impact than the other on a person’s choices and behaviors? Do you remember moments in your own life where you noticed a sharp change in your psychological environment? What did that feel like? How did you frame and manage the change?

(Q2) In the excerpt below, Wes has gone to visit the other Wes in prison and asks him the following question:

“Do you think we’re all just products of our environments?” His smile dissolved into a smirk, with the left side of his face resting at ease.

“I think so, or maybe products of our expectations.”

“Others’ expectations of us or our expectations for ourselves?”

“I mean others’ expectations that you take on as your own.”

I realized then how difficult it is to separate the two. The expectations that others place on us help us form our expectations of ourselves.

“We will do what others expect of us,” Wes said. “If they expect us to graduate, we will graduate. If they expect us to get a job, we will get a job. If they expect us to go to jail, then that’s where we will end up too. At some point you lose control.”

I sympathized with him, but I recoiled from his ability to shed responsibility seamlessly and drape it at the feet of others. (pg. 126)

What are your thoughts on this question — are we the product of our environment? Or of other people’s expectations which we internalize as our own? Or both? And what role does personal responsibility then play in the outcomes of our lives?

(Q3)

“My grandparents knew that I was at a crucial juncture in my life. These forks in the road can happen so fast for young boys; within months or even weeks, their journeys can take a decisive and possibly irrevocable turn. With no intervention — or the wrong intervention — they can be lost forever. My mother made the decision to intervene — and decided that overdoing it was better than doing nothing at all. She felt my environment needed to change and my options needed to expand. Drastically. My grandparents agreed. “ pg. 95

In response to last week’s discussion guide, Trever Reeh asked: How can we help students who fall through the cracks? What system is in place to help those students who need it the most?

RESOURCES

K-12 e ducators, this may be of interest to you: Poets.org has just launched a new initiative, Teach A Poem, which helps you bring poetry into your classroom.

Produced for K-12 educators, Teach This Poem features one poem a week from our online poetry collection, accompanied by interdisciplinary resources and activities designed to help teachers quickly and easily bring poetry into the classroom.

Serendipitously, the poem they shared this week, Knoxville, Tennessee, is by Nikki Giovanni who, you may remember from the beginning of the book, is Wes Moore’s sister’s nameksake. “My mother was obsessed with the poet Nikki Giovanni, in love with her unabashed feminine strength and her reconciliation of love and revolution.” (pg.7) Let us know how it goes if you introduce the poem to your class.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE

• If you haven’t already, create a Medium account. It’s very quick — if you have one, you can use your Twitter account info to log in.
• Read the book along with us.
• Tune in to our publication each Thursday afternoon to read and answer new questions.
• Answer the questions; share your favorite quotes and ideas from the book or share articles and videos which are relevant to the discussion; pose your own questions and reflections; and build upon other member’s answers.
• Host Book Club meet ups in your area! We’ve created a facilitator’s guide to help you plan and organize your meetup, view and download it here.

Check in next Thursday for our next set of questions.