Things My San Quentin Prison Students Have Taught Me So Far:

[Originally Published — May 2012]

1. Their poor grammar and handwriting is not a reflection of their intellectual potential so check your bias.

2. The fact that these prisons are not encouraged or incentivized to provide educational opportunities speaks to the perverse political and moral climate of our social state.

3. The remote locations of California’s prisons from college institutions is both challenging and deliberate.

4. My students think like grad students I know, with only more intrinsic motivation.

5. If I don’t make a concerted effort to approach students first, they will never ask questions… because according to them, there’s a strong undercurrent of class and race for when it’s acceptable to show vulnerability.

6. They don’t want to read stories from other prisoners, they don’t want to hear about reclamation and vindication hyperboles, they want to know what happened to the world they left after they were locked up. And they can find it in the voices of Shakespeare and James Baldwin. You can reach them if questions are readily encouraged.

7. There’s a discrepancy between skill and their natural brilliance, motivation has very little to do with it.

8. Like motivation, laziness is a mask for other issues… my students must handwrite their papers because they lack access to word processors… if I want more from them, I need to treat their 10 handwritten essays like gold.

9. I have to disarm my own excess baggage first, before teaching them.