In their own words
Eric Thomas

Eric Thomas earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Wisconsin in 1998, and a Masters Degree in Education from Johns Hopkins University in 2001. In between graduating from the University of Wisconsin and joining Teach For America, Eric spent six months working as a youth program director at Allied Dunn's Marsh Neighborhood Center in Wisconsin, doing teen drop-in after-school programs for at-risk high school students. He then worked for another six months as a customer service associate at Ward-Brodt Music Company in Wisconsin. He is a 1999 Baltimore corps and has taught English at Northwestern High School for more than five years.

February 15, 2000

My freshmen English students roar into Room 213, fresh off six hours of sitting in desks followed by 30 minutes spent in a chaotic cafeteria. If someone was secretly filming a dramatic reenactment of my life during my first year of teaching, the theme song to last period English with class 906 would be the Temptations "Ain't Too Proud to Beg."

Freshman... I know you wanna leave me, but I refuse to let you go. If I have to beg and plead for your soliloquies, I don't mind 'cause you mean that much to me. Ain't too proud to beg, Tanya -- just one paragraph.

Out of the 90 minutes I'm scheduled to teach a lesson on Romeo and Juliet, about 5 are valuable to the students, and I'm desperate. No one is listening. Amidst all the chaos, there at table number two is the shining, brilliant star, Jayonna Williams. As Kisha interrupts my instruction about Act II by screaming "Mr. Thomas, do you watch wrestling?" Jayonna studies Romeo's soliloquy intently. I brush off Devon's comment that I drive a cheap car and we have a try at the balcony scene. Jayonna apologizes for their behavior with her eyes. Just when I think I've got things going well, my administrator peers in the doorway to see Juliet standing atop my desk delivering lines to Romeo, who is lying on the floor beneath her 'balcony.' He looks on with disdain, and I can only imagine what he's thinking.

A month later, after we get back from spring break, I try to think up the hardest English assignment I could ever give Jayonna, who is clearly not being challenged in class. She has begun coming to my room on her lunch for independent study, and I tell her "I'd like you to write an essay about Shakespeare's imagery of darkness and light." I wait for her response. She smiles and says, "Can I take a book home?" A week later, Jayonna delivers a stunning handwritten paper with beautifully woven textual support. There is no question in my mind now. The greatest irony of my first year as a teacher is that for the first time I have this class—I've got them and they are learning. And even though she got the only 100 I gave anyone in English I, I am failing Jayonna Williams.

April 17, 2002

The rain is pouring as I arrive to pick Jayonna up for the SAT. It's a dark Saturday morning and Jayonna, her mom, and her brother are all huddled under one tiny umbrella on the corner. I rush to get them into the car. "Are you sure you all want to go along, Ms. Andrews?" I ask. "Oh of course," she replies and we drive off. After making a pledge at the end of my Teach For America commitment to follow Jayonna through her four years at Northwestern High School and make sure she gets into the college of her choice, I've gotten to know her family well. Jayonna's mother is disabled and she has never really spoken of her father. She spends much of her nights tutoring her younger brother, cooking, and cleaning their apartment. We all ride together for college tours and SAT testing Saturdays.

In school, Jayonna has raised the bar at Northwestern. She has been the top student in her class for 5 straight semesters and is on her way to being the first student to ever complete coursework in two career academies—Law and Journalism. Her grade point average is a 97.5, and although I haven't taught her since the ninth grade, we have an informal English class every day at lunch. Each time she finishes a book, I give her another one. On top of her other schoolwork, Jayonna has read Ellison's Invisible Man, Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying, Morrison's Song of Solomon, and countless others. I can't wait for her SAT scores to come back, and she's already insisted that Johns Hopkins is the college she wants to attend. Her dream is to become an Obstetrician.

A few months later, Jayonna comes in at lunch and hands me an envelope she has obviously received a while ago. I try to hide my reaction as I see the results: she's scored an 840. We make small talk, and I encourage her that colleges use many criteria in judging applicants, but we both heard the Hopkins tour guide tell us the average score for an incoming freshman is an 1100. Secretly I am enraged. How can a student who has a near-perfect grade point average score so far below the national average on the SAT? Our school and society have done her a disservice, and my heart drops. She will already be judged when colleges see the high school she attended on her transcripts, and now her test scores will validate their pre-conceived notions. A few weeks later she is denied admission at NYU. The fairytale has ended.

May 1, 2003

After keeping the hardest secret of my life for three excruciating days, I hide with a group of teachers, counselors, and a full camera crew inside our school's guidance office. Jayonna has been awarded the prestigious Baltimore Incentive Award, a full four year scholarship to the University of Maryland, and she is the only one on the floor who doesn't know. She rounds the corner and we all scream "CONGRATULATIONS!" This little angel who rarely shows emotion gasps "Oh my goodness!" repeatedly through a flood of tears. We all join her, hugging her, and everyone in the school is ecstatic.

Jayonna took the SAT two more times and her scores improved by over 100 points, She scored in the 95th percentile nationally on the SAT II writing exam, and when she got home from school that day, her mother was exuberantly hanging out of their second story window screaming at the top of her lungs. After the commotion of this amazing day died down, she opened a letter from Johns Hopkins University offering her admission to the school and a $160,000 financial aid package. We laughed together on one of our final lunches at school when we totaled up all of her scholarships and saw that if she enrolled at every college she was accepted to, she would be worth almost half a million dollars.

That spring, Jayonna made her speech as valedictorian of Northwestern High School's class, where she thanked her mother, her family, and then looked over at me through tears and said "Thank you Mr. Thomas for being my earthly father." She will never see a bill for a book, meal, course, or bed at Maryland for the next four years.

Last August, I took one last drive down her block, just before her mother moved into a new house, and helped Jayonna move into Hagerstown Hall at the University of Maryland. She earned a 3.1 Grade Point Average in her first semester of college, and she has chosen to double-major in Biology and Criminal Justice. In April, Jayonna sent me one of her many check-in e-mails, and this message read:

Dear Mr. Thomas: I remember in the 10th grade you gave me the book, Race Matters to read. I didn't know what Cornel West was talking about when I first read it. In my Philosophy of Education class this semester, we studied the philosophy of West and what he believed education should be in American society today. I wrote a paper on West and connected his philosophy on education to a current issue that some public schools are facing today. I thought you'd like to read it.

PS (I got an A+ on the paper!)

Note: Some names have been changed in order to protect the privacy of individuals.

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