To the Panama teacher who said:
I would "be just like my mother" and "fall for the first thing that paid attention to me"
Dear teacher,
So, I didn’t.
It’s true that I did marry young, but my ex-husband was not the first one who paid attention to me. I also married a man who was a kind man and someone who was ambitious and hardworking and humble, and very, very unlike my father. We met in college and together, we went to graduate school and traveled and lived abroad.
However—that’s not the point.
The point is this: your judgment and prediction, not only that you would think it but that you would say so, highlights all that is wrong with this isolated, lowly educated area, and represents the limited critical thought of many people from where I grew up, associating a child with their family.
That’s jarring because you are an educator. You ought to know better. To believe in students and motivate them—not only to their face but also in conversations with other teachers, because they get back to the kids.
You ought to know that word travels very quickly in a small area and these hurtful words would get back to me and affect me.
As an educator in socioeconomically depressed area, you should know better that—
We don’t get to choose our parents and our families, and many of us are trying to rise out of generational poverty and dysfunctional families.
You clearly don’t believe people are capable of doing so.
Because I think about who I was in in high school, a seventeen year old: I was smart, driven, confident. I made good choices and worked hard, earning As and on the National Honor Society. I didn’t party and I never had a boyfriend in high school.
I gave you no evidence that I would lose myself in a boy; still you judged me that this is what my future would be.
Therefore, it was strictly because you saw my mother’s decisions and judged me for them, believing that I would do the same. Marrying a man like my father, the good-looking all American jock, who would become an alcoholic and remain unemployed, falling into poverty. I wonder why you thought this, believing that I would stay in the area, becoming a homemaker and mommy and economically dependent on a man. But here, I’m giving your theory more complex thought than you did.
Because—You knew I wanted to go to college; you asked me about it weekly in high school, “Where are you going?”
You knew I would leave Panama. And I did.
But, I not only went to college. I traveled internationally. I went on to graduate school. Then I moved and lived abroad. Then I enrolled in a PhD program and became a doctor.
Then 50% people in my family killed themselves, and still—I read, I healed, I grew and transformed and, I haven’t stopped. I’m not going to do so.
So—now, 23 years later, divorced, childless, and living autonomously, as an independent woman, a scholar, published author, writer, someone who has editors reaching out to me pursuing me and asking for my work, here’s what I would say—
You are everything that’s wrong about small town USA and associating kids with the families that they come from—when you know their parents and their lives and stories.
People like you are toxic and are the reason why I knew I had to leave Panama even if I had wanted to stay. Because kids become suffocated by peoples’ judgments, because even though you didn’t ever tell me this, to my face, it got back to me.
And those of us who grow up in working poor and dysfunctional families, we know that. We know we are judged.
Many of us are intuitive and we feel it.
Ultimately, you were wrong.
But—shame on you, truly, shame on you: not all students have my devoted mother and the intelligence and the internal motivational drive and the resources to rise above where they came from, like I did. So they need cheerleaders in their corner, rooting for them. Not judgers in the shadows, masquerading as someone who is encouraging and motivating us. And then later, feeling deeply hurt when the news gets back because another educator shares news directly with me that these are the concerns that they have.
You remind me of how in Panama, representative of this very "tiny pond,” people are like small fish deluding themselves into believing they are more important than they really are. But it’s only because you stay in this tiny pond.
I didn’t stay in the pond. Instead, I traveled upstream, flowing into a large river and continued further, arriving into the ocean.
I too am an educator now, a professor, but I promise you this—
I am a better one than you are.
Because I never put caps on what a student will do or not do, based on my judgments. I don’t pretend to be able to predict the future. And certainly not based on one’s family.
I also realize that even if I do have concerns or worries about a student abandoning themselves to their education or a relationship, I will instead encourage them and not judge them and talk about them behind their backs.
To the teacher at Panama who told me I would be like my mother, thank you for teaching me to be the kind of educator that I would never would become.