I Beat the Odds_ From Homelessness, to the Blind Side, and Beyond - Michael Oher [31]
Eventually, even those visits died down. I'm not sure what prompted the authorities to lay off, but I think it might have been some kind of arrangement to keep me in school. I have to say that it worked out pretty well, because eventually I ended up having one very good year academically.
In seventh grade, I was placed in the Ida B. Wells School. It was specifically designed for kids who were behind their grade level due to bad situations at home. I really thrived there that year. The teachers took a different kind of interest in the students' achievement and I felt like I was being stretched academically for the first time in my life. The school itself was located in the basement of Manassas High School, the local high school. We had our own sports teams, and we played against some of the Manassas squads. Even though it was a separate school from Manassas, it was in the neighborhood with the kids who lived all around me. So I was uprooted again, but our program didn't stick out as different.
That year at Ida B. Wells was one that opened my eyes to the fact that school could be a place for real learning to happen if you were taught by committed, caring people. Watching the teachers and knowing that some of them had come out of situations not unlike mine made me see the reality of making something out of your life. I discovered that's really what it comes down to: You've got to want to be something. The problem was that it seemed like there was no one else around me who wanted to be something. There was no one else who I went home to at night who was working hard with dreams of a regular job and the responsibilities of a nice, middle-class life.
After that year of school with good teachers and role models, I was desperate for someone who could mentor me outside of school and teach me how to convert that dream into action, but I couldn't seem to find anyone. I didn't have a person who could sit down and talk me through things like planning for the future and making choices that would benefit me in the long term. So I just started to rely on my own common sense and my own ideas of what I wanted for my life. I would stop and ask myself: Is this a smart decision? What are the consequences of hanging out with these guys? What kind of trouble could I get into if I did this or went there? Do I want the thrill as much as I want to get out of this neighborhood someday?
But following through on those smart choice wasn't always easy. When I hit the eighth grade, I started as a regular student at Manassas High School. That's where I was playing. I say "playing" because that's really all I was worried about with school. I would show up for school just enough to stay eligible for sports (I was on the varsity football team as an eighth-grader, since I was about five feet eleven by then and as big as the seniors), but otherwise I would just hang out during the day with my brothers and their friends.
Looking back on it, I realize what a bad decision that was at the time, but it was just so much easier. While there were some great teachers in the Memphis city schools, after Ida B. Wells, I just didn't have any of them. Mine pretty much didn't care if I was there or not. They just kept passing me so that they didn't have to deal with me anymore, or answer questions as to why I was failing--and it wasn't just me. That was true for so many kids. We would just be held in the classroom for the period and the teacher would go over the material, but nobody (including the teacher) seemed to care if it stuck or not. No one checked for homework or book reports or even gave many tests. When no one around you, at school or at home, seems to think learning is important, it's pretty hard to think that it is important yourself--especially when you're a teenager.
But there was one period a day that I never, ever missed: lunch. At any inner-city school, you'll almost always see that the lunchroom is packed even if there aren't that many kids showing up for class. Since we were all on the free lunch plan, we knew