After high school, I attended Lord Fairfax Community College. That’s where I met Bob Ashcom. Mr. Ashcom was my English Lit professor. He was a tall, 50-something-year-old white gentleman who wore horn-rimmed glasses and dressed like a lawyer (Outside of teaching, he was a huntsman who also owned an equestrian farm). He had an infectious smile and, being an author also, a love for the written word. It wasn’t long before we took to one another. I was a teacher’s dream—young and impressionable with an appetite for knowledge and who loved to read. One day, after assigning the class its final project for the semester, he pulled me aside and said, “I really enjoy reading your papers. Which author are you planning to do a literary criticism on for your final paper?” I told him I was thinking about John Steinbeck or Mark Twain. “I want you to read Ralph Ellison,” he said. “It’s important.”
Prior to that, I had never so much as heard of Ralph Ellison, but I took the assignment because of the trust I had in him. Up until that point, with the exception of studying the Harlem Renaissance, I only read dead white men—Shakespeare, Keates, Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and others. The black author I read was Zora Neale Hurston in eleventh grade.
So I went to Amazon and ordered Invisible Man, Juneteenth and Shadow and Act. As I read through Ellison, I was wide-eyed. I had never works of this magnitude to which I also I felt such a personal connection. When I turned my paper in, I let Mr. Ashcom know that I didn’t get through his three-book requirement, but instead wrote about two. “Did you at least read Invisible Man?” he asked? I told him that I had. “Good,” he said. “I don’t care that you didn’t read three, I just wanted you to read the thing [Invisible Man]. It matters to you.”
I haven’t seen Mr. Ashcom in over 20 years, but he taught me lessons through literature that no member of my family could have articulated about the world I was entering. And I think that’s the hallmark of a good teacher—they can reach you using the tools that matter to you. I feel fortunate to have gone through all of my years of schooling with at least one teacher who was invested in me. Though I wasn’t always a good student, my teachers recognized when I was underperforming and demanded more of me. It’s something that didn’t fully develop then, but that has shaped my work ethic today. It’s the late bloomer in me.
As a parent, this is why I do my best to get to know my kids’ teachers and encourage them to be participatory in their education while at school. Teachers love to teach—the more eager the student the better—and I want my kids to be those students. I know the transformative influence of teachers and I want my kids to experience that too.
Call-Out Quote: “Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.” — Malala Yousafzai
