I was talking last week with a guy who went to my high school around the same time as me, but I had no recollection of him. That’s because, he said, he didn’t play sports, wasn’t in the band, didn’t really join anything.
If you weren’t involved with a group or activity, he said, you were a “nobody.”
I thought about him a few days later when as I watched videos from a concert at our school, Marian Catholic in Chicago Heights. It was the last one as director for Greg Bimm, the school’s venerable band program leader for more than four decades, retires. He made such an impression on his students that more than 100 band alumni, some nearing retirement age themselves, showed up Thursday, instruments in hand, to play one more time for their former director.
Some were performing next to college kids who hadn’t been born when they graduated from Marian. Professional musicians played next to people who hadn’t touched their instrument in ages. It spoke to the powerful legacy of an impactful teacher.
And it also was a showcase of the lasting bonds we forge in high school, relationships that are put into focus everywhere each May.
It’s a time of celebration. Graduates are celebrating the completion of a major life phase. Teachers and administrators are celebrating the completion of another school year. Most students in lower grades happily have climbed another rung in the education ladder.
The achievements of valedictorians, salutatorians, class presidents, sports stars and other standouts are trumpeted and honors are bestowed, in each case rightly so.
Lots of students don’t fit into those categories, though. The majority of high school students walking across the stage at ceremonies this month won’t be mentioned individually in news releases by their schools.
That’s why I was intrigued by news from Shepard High School in Palos Heights about a graduating senior being celebrated because he is a good person.
Kentrell Carson, of Alsip, like all of his colleagues in the Class of ’23, started high school in one era and is finishing in the new world, their tenure interrupted by pandemic.
But most of his peers haven’t made such a lasting impression that teachers from their freshman year still feel fortunate he was in their class way back when.
Carson is an avid learner, but not the school’s top scholar. Instead, he’s made his mark, teacher Julie Boone said, by “always being kind and open with others, regardless of their background or identity.”
“I feel so fortunate to still be in touch with him even after three years of not having him as a student,” she wrote on a Student of the Week nomination form.
She said Carson sent emails checking in with her and her family during the homebound days of pandemic isolation and helped her reconnect with another student who had moved away.
“If I walk down the hall with him, we hardly encounter a person who won’t greet him,” Boone wrote. In making those connections, Boone said Carson “has made an invaluable contribution to our sense of community at Shepard.”
Carson’s not sure he’d go that far.
“I’m a bubbly kind of person,” he said. “I like speaking to people.”
He didn’t need to join the band or play sports to make friends. All he had to do was start conversations.
“When I’m walking in the halls, I’ll shake everyone up because I know so many of them,” he said. “I’m not in a particular friend group. At lunch I move around from friend group to friend group because it’s easy for me to do so.”
The pandemic fueled his appetite for conversation.
“That’s when I became more outgoing,” he said.
The other factor, Carson said, is a natural curiosity about people. His family moved to Alsip from what “wasn’t the best neighborhood,” he said, and the diverse student population at Shepard was a change. So he decided to find out more about his new colleagues.
“If I never speak to them, I’ll never figure out anything about them or their culture,” he said.
For teacher Gia Mallet, an education veteran of 14 years, Carson stands out.
“If you name drop him in front of any staff member, or any student, you get the same reaction: ‘Oh my God I love that kid.’ That’s the vibe from kids, adults,” she said. “He fits in everywhere, with everyone.”
Carson is in Mallet’s true crime class this year, which can deal with topic material that can be “uncomfortable,” she said. At the outset, when students were requesting desk mates after she advised them to choose people they were comfortable with, Carson replied that it didn’t matter. “I’m flexible,” he said.
Meanwhile, several other students requested to sit by Carson.
“I’m perpetually surprised by how many people he’s friends with,” she said.
It won’t be long before Carson is off to make new friends. He accepted a full-ride scholarship to Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he plans to study psychology or computer science, “depending on how long I want to go to school,” he said.
First, he has to walk across the graduation stage.
For Carson, it brings a mixed bag of emotions. Graduation means moving on, and the likelihood he “may never see some of these people again, even some of the ones I really cherish. Because that’s how life is. I’m not letting people go, per se, but we’ll move on and go on our different paths.”
“After I leave, I’ll look back fondly on some of the years spent with these people,” he said. “I can look back fondly, but the present is what’s really going on. I’m looking forward to making new memories.
“I’ve never met an Iowan in my life. I want to see how that pans out.”
Mallet called graduation time a mixture of melancholy and relief.
“I’ve taught juniors and seniors, and some, like Kentrell, I’ve had for back-to-back years. So that makes it tough,” she said. “You’re so excited for them, but you’re sad for yourself too.”
In that short time in May after seniors have wrapped up classes but the rest of the students are still in class, “it’s not as loud, not as bustling,” Mallet said. “The kids get sentimental, and I feel it for those first couple of days when they’re not here.”
One thing that’s changed in Mallet’s decade and a half of teaching is the affect of social media. While an agent of chaos in many ways, she said, it helps students stay in touch long after they’ve made their way into the world.
“Friend requests pop up the day after graduation,” she said. “It’s a nice thing to see from afar what they’re doing, and drop a ‘hi’ or happy birthday. I don’t have that with the first kids I taught 14 years ago.”
Mallet is guessing one of those friend requests will come from Carson, and even if not, he’s left a lasting impression on nearly everyone at Shepard, where “he carved out a spot for himself and people gravitate to him,” she said.
And he did all of that simply by being nice.
It’s a mindset and attitude Carson plans to bring to the next phase of his life, one he’s eager to launch into.
“I wake up each day and wonder what we’re going to get into today,” he said. “If I get into the habit of doing the same thing every day, I’ll end up festering. So I’ll switch it up. Go for a walk down a different path, or do something different. Even the smallest thing can have the biggest effect. Funny how it works. I love it.”
Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.
