This is a story about a young man who showed me how much worse things can be.

Just this past week, as part of a school-wide contest, I had to ask my students to write about reasons why our school and the town it was located in was a great place to be. This contest was prompted partially in response to a string of bad publicity which has somewhat tarnished the name of the school in the local region. So, the hope was that with this essay students would hopefully regain some sense of pride in their school.
After explaining this essay to the students, I could see the smirks and hear the laughter. They could not believe their school was a good place to be.
“You know,” I started out, “right now you are thinking the same thing that every other teenager around the country thinks. My school sucks.” With that comment the mood in the classroom changed a little and the students seemed to be paying more attention to what it was I had to say.
I then began to tell the students about a very eye opening experience I had about seven years ago, while I was working at a high school in Northern New Jersey. It was a big school and it was a hosting school for the SAT tests. While working there, I used to proctor the tests on Saturday mornings. On this one particular Saturday, I had only one student in my room. I was told earlier that the student I would be working with was from another district and had a mild learning disability. Due to his disability the test was to be untimed and he was to take it with no other students in the room.
As the student entered the room he looked around and kept staring at the ceiling. “Everything okay?” I asked.
“Wow,” the student replied.
“Wow what?” I asked.
“Your lights. They all work,” he said as he pointed up to the ceiling.
I have to admit I was quite shocked at first because functioning lights were something I just took for granted. He then looked over to the windows and pointed at them as well, “None of your windows are broken. We have a lot of broken windows in our school.”
Again, I was taken back because at this point in my career I had only worked in two schools and both of them had all of the basic amenities.
Looking around the room some more, the student pointed to a TV and VCR that were mounted to the wall, “You keep them out like that all the time?”
“Well, yes,” I replied.
“You have them in every room?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I responded.
“In my school they wouldn’t last more than a day,” he remarked.
“You mean the VCRs,”
“Yeah and the TVs.”
After having this conversation with the student I asked him where he went to school which is when he showed me his school ID, which he had to anyway so I could confirm his identification for the SAT. This young man was a student at an inner-city school not to far from our own district. At the time, I was shocked because all I could think was that this was not some student from a third world country or some back woods rural school district out in the middle of nowhere. He was a student in a school not that far from the district I was working in. After taking the SAT test, I wished the young man all the luck in the world. He thanked me and looked around the room one last time saying, “I wish I went to school here.”
As he left the room to head back to his school with busted out windows, stolen TVs and broken lights, all I could think about were all the students at that high school that complained about how terrible it was everyday. I only wish they could have met the same young man I met.
Upon completing my story, I looked out at my students and could see a very somber look in their eyes, so I know they listened. Monday, when I go back to school I will begin the process of grading their essays. It is my hope that these students were able to look beyond some of the things their school may lack and see all the things it has. Sometimes in life we get so concerned about how the grass is greener on the other side that we forget about the side that has no grass at all.