All Children Need Good Role Models

Before I became a teacher, before I even went to a university to become a teacher, I was a bus driver. I was not overly ambitious at the time and was happy at my work. Driving students around everyday will keep you busy, and there were many times that I needed to breakup fights between various children. But there was this one Wednesday afternoon when I could not control my high school students at all. They were chanting and shouting out the window at all pedestrians that they saw. Some of them were even poking their heads or arms out the windows.

Normally, I would have stopped the bus and restored order, but not on this day. You see, this particular bus route served mostly Black students, and this was the day after Barack Obama was elected to be the first Black President of the United States. The chanting was "My President is Black", and the passers-by that my students were shouting at were Black adults who were just as jubilant over the previous day's events. The mood in the entire neighborhood was one of joy.

Up to this point, most of the students on my bus looked up to rappers, sports stars, and criminals as their heroes. However, that afternoon I was deeply excited to see that my students all had a new hero, a professional man who had not only graduated high school and college, but had become a law student at Harvard. At the time, I had some strong conservative political beliefs, but I was happy that Obama became President simply because he became an inspiration for my students to excel in life.

This incident has inspired me to think creatively (and sometimes a little bit too unorthodoxly) about how to inspire my students. One time, with the same group of students who were excited about Obama's election, I changed my bus route a bit. I took them through a neighborhood where all the Black lawyers, doctors, and successful businessmen lived. I told these teenagers as much, and they could see the Black children running around in the manicured lawns outside of homes typically built for upper-middle class or rich white folks. We then started talking about the type of people who lived in their own neighborhoods: the pimps, drug dealers, addicts, and folks who never went to or finished college. Soon afterwards, I was transferred to a different route, so I am not entirely sure what happened to these particular students.

When I was the youth leader for my church, I would have to recruit help for various projects. My typical pitch to various adults was to help me out once a year. It could be anything: giving a short 10 minute worship thought, driving for a field trip, teaching a small class about nature or a craft, or being a chaperone for one camping trip. The results were amazing, for the teenagers placed in my care were coming to church more often, and showed an increased desire to be involved in church activities. The reason why these youth wanted to be involved in the church is simply because the majority of the church members took the time once a year to be engaged with the budding adults of the church.

As a teacher, I have tried to place my students in contact with professionals in careers that my students are interested in. My boys who enjoy engineering interview a NASA engineer. The students aspiring for a medical career are assigned to speak with the Dean of Biology at my alma mater. The children interested in business talk to entrepreneurs. I also often present short videos in class of people who started with nothing but an idea, and were able to change that idea into something successful.

Having good role models in your life is crucial for success. If your role models are people who do not try to do well in school, you are not likely to try to be successful in school. If the life aspiration of your role models is to smoke weed, that is likely to be your life aspiration as well. As an educator, I feel that a part of my responsibility is to give my students to opportunity to meet good models - and encourage them to choose people like them as their personal heroes. As a Christian, I feel that it is my duty to bring Christian role models into the lives of my students, so that they do not feel that organized religion is only for older people.