Friendly Fire

I just watched another student of mine, Deonte, walk out of school today under Sheriff's escort, suspended for five days. He had been caught skipping class for the fourth time. Talking with him in our assistant principal's office was an experience akin to what I imagine it is like trying to break a CIA covert operative. Deonte simply had nothing to say to me or our principal.

After watching Deonte in his Intro and Algebra I classes last year, I knew that he had a natural knack for math. Ideas came easy to him when they baffled others... I know because he passed his previous two math classes despite sleeping through most lectures and practice sessions. He would simply pick his head up, fill out his worksheets, and go back to sleep. Two things -- at least, two surface symptoms -- continually held him back. He rarely came to class if he wasn't escorted by an administrator, and his friends constantly pushed him in the wrong direction.

Coming back to the present moment... the worst part of his stonewalling was the complete lack of defiance, pride, or cockiness in his demeanor and facial expression. Most young men in high school, when they're staring down the barrel of disciplinary action, exhibit a brash confidence... a cocking of the head, an ever-so-slight combative sneer curling their lip, a protruding chin. Deonte showed me nothing.

And I mean nothing.

His eyes were vacant lots that screamed of resigned apathy. His slumped shoulders suggested that he might have been an abused, overworked pack mule in a previous life. He showed no spark of... anything.

I don't know for sure, and maybe I never will, but I can easily envision what produced that in him. I think that one day, someone important to Deonte told him one of the following things:

1) You're going to end up just like your father.
2) You're a worthless loser.
3) You'll be lucky to hold down an overnight job at WalMart.
4) You're nothing but a pain.
5) You'll be in jail before you'll ever be in college.
6) You'll end up strung out on drugs.
7) Etc...

Deonte and so many young men like him have heard something like this and embraced it as the truth. Maybe they've heard it so often that they can't fit any other possibility into their minds.

You probably know at least one young man in your life that has heard something like this. Please tell him something different. Give him another vision.

"I have set before you today life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, that you and your children might live." ~Deuteronomy 30:19