Deb­bie Ja­cob

There are peo­ple who on­ly see the neg­a­tive in every­thing. They're called cyn­ics. Once in a blue moon, when I'm talk­ing about the ac­com­plish­ments of one of my stu­dents in YTC, one of those cyn­ics sur­faces and says, "But that is just one stu­dent you're talk­ing about." That state­ment al­ways baf­fles me be­cause I went in­to teach­ing at YTC think­ing that if I could save on­ly one stu­dent, I would count that as suc­cess.

Over time, I felt good about that de­ci­sion of count­ing suc­cess as "just one stu­dent" be­cause as Ster­ling Stew­art, the Deputy Com­mis­sion­er of Pris­ons once said to me, "Do you know what you do when you help one of these boys? You are ac­tu­al­ly sav­ing fu­ture gen­er­a­tions."Any­way, let me show you what one stu­dent means in the scheme of things. Let's take the young man I called Pe­ter in Wish­ing for Wings, the book I wrote about my first CXC Eng­lish Lan­guage class at YTC.

One lad asked Pe­ter to come to my first CXC Eng­lish class five years ago. I re­al­ly didn't know if Pe­ter would make it. He couldn't sit still. He had to move to learn, but that didn't de­ter me from teach­ing him. Pe­ter re­ceived a 2 on the CXC Eng­lish lan­guage ex­am. If we didn't have to fast track the class and do the two-year syl­labus in less than eight months, I be­lieve he would have re­ceived a 1.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers