A local venue in my town holds a once-a-month adult storytelling event in its art gallery/meeting space. Each storytelling session asks grownups to tell stories on a theme: October’s theme will be Halloween/scary stories; I suppose  November’s will be stories on a theme of Being Thankful (or maybe overeating); December is likely to feature holiday stories (although that could be overeating too).

September being the month when kindergarten through college students go back to school, last night’s theme was “school/learning/teachers.” Four featured storytellers performed.  At an open mic session after they spoke, attendees were invited to tell their own stories. As a former  teacher, I had a lot of stories, but my ingrained inclination is to let the “kids” go first, so by the time five impromptu storytellers spoke, the evening was over. I did not tell my story last night, but it’s on my mind, so here goes:

As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a teacher. When my cousins and siblings played “school,” I stood at the front of the class and gave them assignments. I portrayed a teacher in a high school play. As a high school senior, I worked as a teacher’s assistant in the junior high. The teacher turned over her class of seventh-graders to me to teach for eight weeks. It seems astonishing now that a teen-ager would have been given that much autonomy, yet Laura Ingalls Wilder taught in a one-room schoolhouse from age 15 to age 17,  so it’s not like the right person can’t teach, regardless of his or her age. I taught Greek mythology to my class of seventh-graders, and they loved it. They loved me. My mentor said, “You are a born teacher.”

But I saw how my mom, a history teacher, barely got her shoes toed off every day after school before collapsing on the couch for an hour-long nap before she made supper. She graded papers late into the evening after we went to bed. I did not want to live perpetually exhausted and a slave to my job.

So when I graduated from college, I did not graduate as a certified teacher. I headed off to New York City with a hundred dollars in my wallet and a fuzzy plan to make a big splash doing something in journalism or publishing, or maybe acting. I lived in the East Village. I went to museums. Auditioned. Wrote. Made friends. Spent my first Christmases away from home.

And yet, even though I loved living there, I skated on the surface of New York life because, deep in my heart, I knew this magnificent city was not where I was supposed to be. When I looked out my bedroom window at brick and mortar rather than at trees and grass, I knew I belonged in a greener place. I knew I needed to set down roots where my roots could grow. But I didn’t know where that might be.  

One day, I flew down the steps of my apartment building on Fourteenth Street on my way to work, but when I got to the front door, a drunk was passed out across the threshold. I knocked on the inside of the door. I pounded. I yelled. He didn’t move.

I clicked the latch open and shoved. Finally, the drunk moved enough so my messenger bag and I could slip out. I strode toward the subway, late for work—and then I stopped, thinking, How can you leave a human being passed out and helpless? I ran back.

The man was still passed out. His clothes were filthy. His white hair was a mess. He stank. He had one of those noses severe alcoholics acquire over time, spongy and red and huge—think W.C Fields. I said, “Excuse me—can I get you some help? Do you want me to call somebody? Where do you live? Hello?”

He opened the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen, the same shade as the blue morpho butterfly but even more intense. He moved lips like two purple slugs. Drool spilled down his chin. He opened his mouth and said, “Brrbcckkkkgg.”

Loud and slow, I said,“ Do you want me to call an ambulance? The police?”

Comprehension glimmered in those astonishing eyes. He said, “Gbblllsshzh. Bzzuh.”

He was so drunk he couldn’t talk. When he laid back down, I shrugged and went to work.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and my thoughts ultimately jelled around one idea: Blue Eyes had once been somebody’s baby. He’d been somebody’s little boy. He’d sat in somebody’s classroom. Hadn’t anybody cared about him? Hadn’t anybody made him feel he deserved better than ending up passed out in a doorway? Hadn’t anybody made him feel like he mattered?

And how many other blue- or green- or brown-eyed children in the world didn’t feel like they mattered? Could I help any of them? How?

People toss around the word “epiphany,” but as sure and bright as the sun coming from behind a cloud, I knew what I could do for these somewhere, someday kids I hadn't met yet: I could be their teacher.

I returned to the Midwest to earn a certificate to teach and got a job as an English teacher. Like my mom, I worked after-hours at my kitchen table: I filled big boxes with papers and dragged them home in a Radio Flyer, working literally one year at home for every five I spent in the classroom (yes, I did the math). And yet, despite all those years with students, I wasn’t certain I’d made the difference I’d hoped to make when I started.

That changed one day when I ran into a former student in the grocery store, a girl I’d had in class at the beginning of my career. When “Tiffany” saw me, she gave me a big hug. We chatted: she was the mother of two young adults; she liked her job; she and her husband got along. Then she said, “You know, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.”

“At the grocery store?” I joked.

“No. When I took your stagecraft class, I wanted to kill myself.”

I sobered. “Wh-what?”

“I was planning to check out my freshman year,” she said.

A thick silence dropped around us.  The other shoppers faded. She continued, “I’d had it with everything. I didn’t want to be here any more. And then I walked into your class. You gave me jobs that I had no idea how to do and expected me to try them. If I screwed up, you helped me. You praised me. You made me feel like I could do stuff. Like I belonged.”

I said, “You did belong. You were my kid.”

“I know. Everybody was your kid. But the thing is, I didn’t want to check out after I met you. When you showed me I mattered to you, I started to matter to myself.”

My throat was so tight, I couldn’t talk. So I hugged her. As I drove home, I thought, Even if Tiffany is the only one, it was all worth it.

Educator and anthropologist Loren Eiseley (about whom pal Ray Bradbury said, "[His] work changed my life") tells the story of a kid who tosses beached starfish back into the ocean. The story has gone round and round educational circles to a point that it’s become something of an eye-roller. Stop me if you've heard this one:

Bottom line: teachers, you make a difference, even if you don’t see it, even if you’re exhausted and overworked and underpaid and never run into one of your grown-up former students in a grocery store.

You matter. Never forget it.

I was a high school English teacher for 25 years before I retired to write full-time. This winter, I got a call to do a stint of teaching, only my students wouldn’t be teen-agers; they would be adult learners at a community college. People my own age-ish. Hm.

When I taught teen-agers, I learned early on that a lot of the job is about personal connection. The students must like you. By “like,” I don’t mean the teacher and the teen go out for breakfast and paint one another’s toenails. (Ew.) “Like” means the student accepts that even though the teacher’s subject is something lame like, say, English grammar, the class is OK because the teacher is fair (“fair” means the teacher cuts people slack now and again). The teacher does not bludgeon one student with another (doesn’t play favorites). The teacher is not a hypocrite who says one thing and does another. For a teen, a teacher should be consistent, clear, and helpful without being a pushover. Bonus if the teacher is funny or even playful.

This kind of teacher will be able to pull some effort from most students, although it must be acknowledged that a great deal of teen-agers’ passion is directed at their peers and activities rather than their academics. It also should be noted that it’s even tougher to get work out of students who don’t like the teacher, because these students suffer at their desks like prisoners serving a sentence.

With adults, however, liking the teacher is moot. With adult learners, optimal learning means squeezing out everything the teacher offers and then rolling the tube tight to get out that last little dab. There’s nothing passive about it. Whereas a teen-ager, generally, is reluctant to ask for clarification or extra help, an adult insists on it. Adult learners work jobs and rear families and have now added the burden of school. They don’t want to mess around. They want to learn, dang it, and if you’re their teacher, you’d better deliver.

I LOVE THIS ATTITUDE. When I sit down with an adult student, I deal with an equal who has gray hair and wrinkles and lumps, somebody who pays bills and hauls kids and endures hardship and knows there is no free lunch, not no way, not no how. Adult learners do not feel entitled, except insofar as they have paid for the privilege of learning and insist that it happen. An adult learner already has a full life but wants a better one. Whereas teen-agers are trapped by compulsory education laws, adults have chosen education as a means to an end. A teen-aged learner might count off the days until freedom rolls on down like a mighty river; an adult learner is that supermarket sprinter who’s dashed in for milk because he’s got to have supper on the table in one hour. They want to git 'er done.

The United States has 1.5 million adult learners, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Some adult learners are just out of high school. Some of them are great-grandparents. All of them are in school because they see education as a path to a living wage and a life of dignity. Learning new things can be fun, but going to school is hard, doubly so when it's only one item on your daily list of things to do and triply so when your skills haven't been brushed up for 25 years and many of your fellow students are half your age.

Therefore, it’s no exaggeration to say an adult learner is on a hero’s quest. The man who defined the hero’s journey in The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949), author Joseph Campbell, says the hero’s journey occurs when an ordinary person is called to leave behind the familiar and embark on an adventure in search of something important. The hero may be protected early in the adventure by a mentor or may acquire allies along the way, but ultimately faces a final battle. The hero returns home, having defeated his adversary and won the prize, which the hero then shares with those who were left behind.

What I didn't anticipate when I began teaching adults was that many of my students would become my heroes. They've left what's familiar to go on an adventure in search of something important, and when the adventure is over, they'll bring something valuable home. Let me introduce you to a handful of them (I’ve changed names and skewed details to preserve their privacy.):

“Deb” and her husband have endured hardship and raised a family. She’s training for a career that will put herself and her husband in a better place when they retire. Deb hasn’t been in school since before computers were invented, yet everything nowadays is done on the computer. Imagine somebody shutting you in a horse barn and ordering you to saddle up a creature you’ve only ever seen on TV. Luckily, this stint in school ain’t Deb’s first rodeo.

“Ruby” is divorced. Her ex hid their assets, so Ruby is back in school for the first time in twenty years so she can train for a job that will let her pay her bills and put food on the table. Ruby can’t study in the college library as long as she’d like to because she has to be home when the school bus drops off her kids. Once the munchkins go to bed, though, Ruby hits the books.

“Alan” is ex-military. He’d hoped to make the Army a career until he was injured. Now, Alan is working on a business degree despite physical pain from his injury that never quite leaves him—which means Alan’s battle doesn't end when he goes home at the end of the day. He soldiers on anyway.

“James” suffered a brain injury some time ago. He can’t remember things very well from day to day, so his learning path doesn’t run in a straight line. It loops. James has been in school for a while, though, because he likes to learn. He perseveres. He runs his race one mile at a time, round and round, without dropping out, and if he passes the finish line more than once and keeps on running, well, that's just the way he rolls.

“Felicia” was born here, but her parents came from another country. English is Felicia’s second language. Felicia has worked alongside her parents in low-wage jobs, but she wants a better life for herself, so she’s studying to make English her first language—not by birth but by choice.

“Sally,” five feet nothing in her stocking feet, always wanted to drive an 18-wheeler tractor-trailer truck. At age 72, she started a truck-driver training course, half of which was online. She couldn’t even turn on a computer when she started school. Despite that, Sally got top grades and outscored everybody in the behind-the-wheel portion of her coursework. Sally had a dream job offer in hand when she graduated, and now she's a road warrior.

These six and others like them have allowed me to mentor them on their hero’s journey. Thanks, guys, for letting me tag along.