Thoughts.com Blogs - The Dictionary

     Willam is my prized student. He arrives everyday 30 minutes early, is kind and respectful, and always,always completes his assignments. This is an anomaly for an incarcerated student. I nominated him to recieve the "Student of the Month" award for March. The smile that spread across his face from one ear to the other when I announced his name was priceless. Each student who recieves this award, recieves $10.00 to be put in their account to spend how they choose at the prison store. William was adament that he did not want the money but asked if I could give him a dictionary instead.
    For you see everyday that William was in class he always had this large black dictionary sitting on the table next to his work. Anytime he had a writing assignment he would be completely engrossed within pages and pages of words. He was always asking me how to spell certian words and my teacher response was always, "Look it up". I think for William the dictionary that he coveted held some sort of freedom for him. He would look up a word, find it, and then write the correct spelling within his essay. But instead of moving on he would always flip through additional pages looking up and down at all of the words that he did not know.
    On Monday afternoon when William did not arrive for class early, I learned that over the weekend my student of the month, put a five inch shank in the neck of "one of his bros" who owed him money, almost killing him. Today my student sits in the Special Housing Unit (SHU) awaiting transfer most likely to a SuperMax prison. I picture him in his cell for 23 hours out of the day reading his dictionary like a book.  I am still naive and astonished of what my students are capable of and what type of environment I work in. If I had to guess which one of my students would put a shank in someones neck on the yard, William would have been my last guess. I can only hope that the dictionary that he earned provides him with the words that will lead him to mental freedom, the only kind he will ever recieve.