Day One

9.08.10 By Noel Reyes

(for BTC)

My name is Mr. Reyes, but you can call me Rey.
Because no matter what happens, I will be in your face shortly after sunrise.
And even though I don’t have all the answers, I will always approach you with warmth.

This class is called Humanities 2—because it’s a combination of history and English.
But it should really be called Humanity Itself—because it’s a combination of everything you need to know to be powerful, and what you should do with that power when you have it.

(That’s why I’m thinking about changing the name to “like your life defends upon it”—so you can look at your schedule and see that after you go to 1st period study hall, you have to go to 2nd period like your life depends upon it.)

Yes, you can come after school for extra help.
No, there is no limit on the number of times you can come.

Don’t be embarrassed to come every day—that embarrassment is nothing compared to how you will feel when the feedback from your first persuasive essay reveals how your pathos was kinda pathetic, and your ethos was erased by editing mistakes;

Or how embarassed I will feel when my lesson on the Great Depression plummets like the stock market in 1929, just as the principal walks in.

These moments

Are chances to prove that failing miserably is temporary, but getting back up again is a way of life. And when we are up to our neck in disappointment and brought to our knees by frustration, crawling forward together, until we can manage to get on our feet again, is exactly how we

Make and remake this classroom into a community and

Learn and relearn the meaning of perseverance.

Believe me, no matter how good you are at feigning sickness to get a pass to the nurse so you can wander the halls, you will still be unable to avoid all the “teachers” who give out assignments like “write an essay” with no other details, or all the “friends” who say they love you but keep pressuring you to be someone else.

If everything really does happen for a reason, then maybe they exist to prepare you to deal with the even bigger injustices that live outside the walls of this school—by then, you’ll be so good at doing the impossible that you can overcome anything.

Speaking of impossible, no amount of chemical substances in your hair, ink on your skin, gold around your neck, or piercings on your face will make you see how beautiful you are if you don’t already see it.

And you’re not the only one hurting. Some people wear it on their faces and some people hide it behind the smiles on their faces. Some people make others’ worse by trying to make their own hurt go away. You’ll be better off the sooner you figure out that making other people hurt less makes you hurt less too.

And there is danger here. I don’t know who made four years of high school determine sixty-four more years of your life expectancy. But a few wrong decisions can show you exactly how much you had to lose in the first place, while a few right decisions can take you higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide.

Before you know it, you’re gonna make a best friend. You’re gonna share everything. You’re gonna laugh and everything and each other. And I’m really gonna admire your willingness to do anything for your best friend, even lie, or fight, or steal. But a true best friend wouldn’t ask you to lie, fight, or steal.

And be warned: You can’t get away with cutting my class. Don’t even think about doing it. Drugs, unprotected sex, and stealing technology are also on the list of “Things You Should Never Even Think Of Doing.”

But because you or someone you know is going to do it anyway, you will learn that lesson, too: Now you’ll do the makeup work instead of the original work, also known as the really hard work instead of the hard work, all because your shortcut turned out to be a whole lot of steps in the wrong direction.

And in that point when you feel like you have
Nothing left to give,
I will tell you that

There’s nothing more honorable than how you showed up and took responsibility for the bad decisions you made. And that you are courageous for trying to dig your way out, even as your mom’s boyfriend’s yelling keeps you up at night, and it takes you forever to help your sister finish her homework before you can start yours.

Then, you will begin to see that you have already been through challenges far bigger than the one that happens to be sitting in front of you right now.

But just in case you don’t believe me …

I will literally take your $150 sneakers off your feet and lock them in the closet until you finish. This is when you will realize, if you haven’t already, that you messed with the wrong teacher.

Of course, you won’t believe me then when I say that one day, you will thank me. But when that day comes, and you ask me, “How can I ever thank you?” I will tell you that you thank me every day, because

You hold the doors open and you respect old people and you tell people that “gay” doesn’t mean stupid and that that you’re not stupid if you don’t understand something at first.

Because

You put the try in triumph, and
You put the umph in triumph

And because

It has been a privilege getting to know you, and I feel valued because you stop by and let me know how your weekend was, and ask me for advice every now and then, and bring me leftovers that your mom makes, and ask me to go sledding on snow days …

You

Are the reason why
I know that
Every day
Is day
One.