Celebrating second chances

I love to see a second-chance student--the one who majored in partying the first time around but came back ten years later to try again and aced every class; the one who had epic meltdowns at tense moments every semester but took time off and then came back to struggle tooth and nail to earn a degree; and the one everyone thought was a waste of space until someone decided to give her another chance.

I have one of those students this semester. Every time she turns in a writing assignment, I am grateful that we didn't give up on her. She's killing it in every class session, not only producing brilliant work herself but also inspiring her classmates to do the same. Sure, she's a little behind her peers on progress toward commencement, but she'll get there--and she'll be well prepared to face whatever challenges lie ahead. 

There's nothing like a dose of harsh reality to motivate students to get serious about college. I've often argued that everyone should be required to spend time working in food service just to get some perspective on how petty, cruel, and unfair the world can be, but most of my traditional students have never even held part-time jobs. They're serious athletes who spend all their free hours practicing and all their summers playing on traveling teams, so they've never experienced the injustice of being forced to clock out for a rest-room break or the indignity of serving up French fires while a manager brushes his hand across their butt--accidentally, of course.

My second-chance students know what it's like to struggle and suffer and somehow turn their lives around. They tell me stories sometimes that would curl your hair, but they come back and they carry on and they find a way to survive. One of my second-chance students is a poster child for how to find success as an English major and the one I have in class right now is well on her way to similar status, but we'd never know how talented she could be unless someone had decided that she deserved a second chance.