I’ll hazard a guess that anyone who has taught for two decades or more like me will have taught a student they can’t forget. While I was taking jog during spring break, he came back to me, like he usually does, with the same expression on his face telling me: You, teacher man, don’t know s–t about s–t.
Charles Tembo checked into my class in the winter of 1996. This wasn’t unusual for a high school in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where students lived below the poverty line and families suddenly had to move because of a lost job, a fire, an incarceration, a hospitalization or a sudden death. The class rosters I started with in the fall weren’t the same in January.
In Charles’ case, he’d been in juvenile detention and was given one last chance at high school. Any disciplinary issue, he would be expelled. Nobody told me this before he arrived. Well, Charles’ face continued to say what it said, and the day he wouldn’t take off his Walkman headphones, I told him to go see an administrator.
When I saw him again, he said he was going to find out where my family lived: “I’m going to blow them up.” For a split second, I thought I should go for his throat and not let go. Charles must have seen my thought and said, “Nah, nah, I was just joking with you.” Then he was expelled.
When I asked Charles why he wasn’t interested in learning, he said, “Because I’m going to be dead before I’m 21.” After his expulsion, I checked with a guidance counselor who said, “Adam, Charles really scared me. When his girlfriend gave birth, and the baby died, Charles laughed about it. Keep an eye out, brother.”
I did. Every morning. One day, I saw him at the end of the hallway, and he ducked down the stairs. Another time, when I returned to class, the pictures on my desk of my baby son were turned down. My coat was stolen from my room. I grew paranoid, but nothing else happened until one cold spring day, while I was driving on Interstate 95 to school, I heard on the radio that Charles had been murdered.
Students confirmed it. One of my favorite students, Manny, cried when he told me. This was the first moment of the teachings of Charles Tembo for me. Wasn’t Charles a nihilistic monster? Why the tears? When Manny told me how Charles was murdered, I wish he hadn’t. Another lesson.
I wrote about Charles years ago to let him go, but Charles is here. That’s how it is. He’s still trying to hip me to the truth. When I moved from Connecticut to Ohio in the summer of 1998, I had a mental breakdown with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and clinical depression. Charles was teaching me, making me see my profound ignorance and the limitations of an education system hellbent on protecting the property values of the elite — like those living around Bridgeport — at the expense of everyone else kept out of sight, even if they live a mile away and are only seen when a suburban school plays a city school in sports.
Like the rest of our country, equal education doesn’t exist from suburb to city because of extreme racial segregation and economic disparities: You really want to talk about it, update yourself, teacher man, on the life and death of Connecticut’s Sheff V. O’Neill.
Charles tuned in with perfect pitch to what I couldn’t provide for him as a teacher. Poverty was nonstatistical and lived. He knew why the dropout rate was 50%, and why there was a baby room next to the school’s cafeteria. He knew the rapacity of the American Dream, the misdirections of well-meaning adults, the lying lessons of teachers who didn’t live in Bridgeport but got paid.
Charles saw the future. He saw mine. He knew I was white, young, privileged and not saying a word he needed to know — even with Room 255’s posters of Malcolm X and Frederick Douglass and Billie Holiday — in a school that had nothing to teach him during numbered days. Teachers are part of the rigged game, and Charles saw they didn’t want to see it. He saw it in me.
The question on a cold spring day in Missouri in 2024: Do I know the score, now? And, if I do, what am I — or any teacher for that matter — going to do in the classroom?
Keep asking questions, teacher man.
Adam Patric Miller has taught high school for 25 years in three states and currently teaches in St. Louis. He is the author of the book “A Greater Monster.”
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