Memorable Students

I began teaching rather late in life – at the age of 49 – but of all the jobs I’ve had, teaching is the best. My present high school is my fourth, and the job is still enjoyable.

When I began, all those years ago, I often wondered what it would be like to see the name of one of my former students in the newspaper, or to hear of that student on the television. That has now happened to me, twice. It is not the experience I thought it would be.

I have been cleaning out files following my move to Asheville, and I ran across a picture from my very first year of teaching. The school that first hired me was a very expensive school: the year I left that school, it charged the same tuition as my alma mater, Wake Forest University. Wake is a private college, and it is not cheap. My first high school was likewise private and absolutely not cheap. It did offer some advantages to those who could afford it, including one-on-one classes. It is remarkable how much progress a student can make if he or she is the only student in the class.

The picture I found was of a student in a one-on-one class with me. He was at the board working problems, while I was sitting in a chair next to the board, offering guidance. I guess it was a photo for the yearbook. At any rate, it ended up in my files.

That particular student, in that one-on-one class, came to us during his senior year. He was barely a senior. He had spent the prior year in a boot camp school, so he had a lot of catching up to do. His grandparents had some spare cash and agreed to pay the very high tuition for all private classes. As I recall, it took the entire senior year plus three summer sessions for this young man to acquire enough credits to earn his diploma. He graduated in late August, and I thought nothing more of him.

Until, that is, the October following his graduation. One morning in October, I cranked up my computer as usual, and opened a web browser. I had set the home page of the browser to the local newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This once-proud newspaper now barely exists, but at the time it was the go-to newspaper for the Atlanta area. My browser opened up, and what did I see but a picture of my student. My first impression was that, since graduating from high school, he had acquired a tattoo of his initials on his left bicep. The reason the tattoo jumped out at me was because his bicep was flexed. That tends to happen when your wrists are handcuffed behind you.

This young man had made the news for murdering his grandfather, and nearly murdering his grandmother. Both were cruelly beaten. I am not clear on motives, but as a naturally suspicious fellow, I suspect that drugs were involved. At any rate, this young man showed up one Monday morning at a bank, trying to cash a check for $50,000 written on his grandfather’s account. The teller was suspicious, and alerted the manager, who alerted the police. The check, as it happens, was forged. When the police arrived at the grandfather’s house, they found his bloody corpse, and the nearly-dead grandmother.

Sometime later the newspaper reported that he had struck a deal. He avoided the death penalty in exchange for life in prison without the possibility of parole. As far as I know, he has been in prison since then. The murder happened when he was around the age of 19. It is truly a waste of a life.

I never did hear if his grandmother recovered.

The second memorable student is another student from that first, expensive school, and what I am about to relate occurred maybe ten years after I had left the school. The only thing memorable about her during her years at the school is that she dressed every day in black, in a style the kids referred to as “Goth”. Other than that, there was nothing about her to indicate that one day I would hear about her on the television news.

I had taken my mother to visit her only living sister. My first morning there, while sipping on a cup of coffee, I heard a news report from one of those morning feel-good shows that all the networks air. I didn’t pay any attention until I heard the name of the person involved: she was my former “Goth” student. On the bright side she had not murdered anyone. On the downside, she sat by while a man died, and she did nothing.

This former student had become a very high-priced call girl on the west coast. One of her clients was a married man with five children who was an executive with a well-known tech firm. She had joined him one evening on his boat at the marina. She sipped wine while he overdosed on heroin. The security cameras from the marina captured this on film. After a while, she stepped over his body to get another glass of wine. Finishing her wine, she left without checking on him, or without calling for an ambulance.

Prostitution is still illegal in California, so they nailed her on that charge. Whether she payed any price for leaving the tech exec there to die without calling for help is a question I can’t answer. As it happens, she was a Canadian citizen, so after she completed her prison sentence she was deported.

Those are my two experiences with former students making headlines. While I wish all my former students good luck and great success in their careers, I no longer wish to see any of them in the news!