On mentorship, resources, and excellence
“Everything worthwhile is done with other people.” — Mariame Kaba
Years ago when I was so depressed and burnt-out from teaching that I wanted to die, hiking the Tennessee Valley Trail in Marin County with my dear friend and mentor Jody Lewen helped save my life.
Jody is the President of Mt. Tamalpais College (MTC) at San Quentin State Prison. For almost 25 years, she has been building a model for higher education in prison — one that fundamentally disrupts the prison system itself and that President Obama awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2016.
One day when we were out hiking, she shared a critique that she had recently (and frequently enough) received from a partner in the reform/abolition world. Why doesn’t MTC expand into some of the other prisons in California?
Because even her venting is brilliant, Jody was like, and I’m paraphrasing here, “I’m so tired of people criticizing us for not scaling up. We’re not yet operating the way we want to be at this site. Why would we stretch our already overwhelmed staff to produce more, less adequate educational experiences to people who have been offered mostly shitty educational experiences their whole lives — which is, by the way, partly how we got ourselves into this mess [the human rights catastrophe that is the prison industrial complex]?”
Then she said the part that I know I’m quoting verbatim because I’ve been thinking about it ever since — “Nobody asks Stanford to scale up.”
Back to me paraphrasing: Everybody knows that excellence costs resources. That’s why they pour abundant resources into elite, highly exclusive places like Stanford — so their students and faculty have the resources they need to produce excellence. Why is every resource allocated to places that serve poor people always expected to be stretched and diluted so far? Can we just see what would happen if we’re allowed to pour resources into this one project?
I was shook.
This was during the pandemic, which had already radically shifted my thinking about the best use of my time with kids. Now I wondered how abundant resources would change everyday life in my classroom in Oakland. What would life be like if the kids in my classroom got the same stuff the rich kids get?
Alas, I do not have access to Stanford’s endowment or donor database. I am, however, rich in relationships — I’m lucky (and thankful!) to be connected to many, many folks who are vibrant, sharp, hard-working, creative experts and leaders in the Bay Area, California, the US, and globally.
I made a few phone calls, as they say, and when we came back into the school buildings for the 2021–2022 school year, my folks and I were ready:
- Earlonne Woods, co-host of the podcast Ear Hustle and co-author of This is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Life in Prison, used his social media platform to raise money for us to fund our class budget. We bought LED lights, lamps, rugs, rolling office chairs, foldable tables, and snacks.
- Storied community leader Lonnie Morris joined my classes two days a week, every week, lending us his dozens of years of expertise in youth development inside San Quentin State Prison by facilitating ad hoc groups and mentoring students one-on-one right there in our classroom.
- Piper Kerman, author of acclaimed memoir (turned Netflix hit) Orange Is the New Black, had her publisher send us copies of her book and came in to talk with us about life in and after prison, writing the book, and the show.
- Roy Duran and Chris Johnson from the Success Stories Program led a weekly group for fifteen boys. Highlighted in a 2018 CNN documentary, Success Stories was founded by men incarcerated at Soledad State Prison, using the work of bell hooks to consider how their commitment to patriarchy presents obstacles to true success — living a values-driven life with integrity.
- Leslie Van Houten, most known for her participation in the late 1960s Manson murders, wrote to us from the California Institute for Women, sharing her reflections on resisting peer pressure and the value of making up one’s own mind. (!)
It’s worth noting that between the six of them, the community members that stepped up to pour their wisdom and love into my classes have spent a combined 155 years in prison.
Prisons shrink the worlds of those inside the walls, but in the years I spent teaching in carceral settings, I got to learn from people who found ways to live freely anyway — nurturing relationships and projects that connected them to folks working for freedom and justice all over the world.
I prefer Mariame Kaba’s and Erica Meiners’ term school-to-prison swamp for what’s commonly called the school-to-prison pipeline — “interlocking sets of structural and individual relationships in which youth, primarily of color, are funneled from schools and neighborhoods into under- or unemployment and prisons.”
If we want to repair and nurture those relationships and reimagine those structural designs, educators would do well to solicit the input of the people who have been on the receiving end of those “interlocking sets.” Too often, schools clear only very narrow pathways toward “the real world.” Folks who have struggled for and achieved freedom from the depths of the swamp have the vision and experience that we need to transform our schools into places that make kids’ worlds bigger.
Jody was right. Actively welcoming in a most precious resource — the time and attention of trusted community elders with relevant expertise — yielded the relationships and community that are fundamental to drawing out students’ excellence.
Everybody has some kind of excellence in them, but in a shoddily funded school like ours, too many kids slip into and out of crowded classrooms, never getting the time and attention they need to discover that they, too, are “everybody.”
I love the way one student put it in her final reflection paper: “In this class, I decided to give in and do the work because I’ve never been so convinced or wanted to be heard so much. It feels special.”
Calling in my greatest resources — my people — has made our classroom a space of abundant joy, a restorative place in the mental health obstacle course that is (a chronically undermined) high school (during the apocalypse).
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Last weekend I went for another hike with Jody and she challenged me (again) to write some more essays about what I’m doing.
