I Beat the Odds_ From Homelessness, to the Blind Side, and Beyond - Michael Oher [41]
My school records were a mess. I can't even remember how many different schools I attended. I often changed schools when my mom moved, and I went to different schools when I was in the foster care system. Sometimes I'd just be in a class for a few weeks and then it would be off to another house and another school. My mother had never made me do homework or helped me read a book. My mother had never made me get up and go on the mornings I was feeling lazy. No one had ever bothered to take the time to find out what I did and didn't know. I did just enough work to let them know I was still alive and they passed me along because I was a good athlete, and especially in high school, they wanted to keep me eligible to play.
Finally, after a long, hot week of driving all over Memphis to visit different schools, we arrived at Briarcrest. It was a long drive out to the campus--it felt almost as long as to ECS. And when we reached it, my jaw nearly hit the floor of the car. I had never seen anything at all like that school. It was actually still under construction at the time--classes wouldn't start there until the next school year--but the administration offices had already moved over from the old campus, so that was where we headed.
Everything about it, from the buildings to the stadium, was cleaner and newer than any school I'd ever seen. I don't think I realized there was such a thing as a nicely paved parking lot without potholes and huge cracks running every direction with weeds popping through. Tony seemed excited about Briarcrest, because he'd just found out that a basketball coach he respected a lot had recently been hired there and he hoped that Steve would have a chance to play for him.
While Tony went into the office to make his pitch, Steve and I stood out in the sparklingly clean hallway. We didn't say much, we just sort of looked around at the beautiful new building, afraid to touch anything, and then looked back at each other every now and then and shook our heads, as if we were both thinking, "Who in the world has this much money?"
Tony's meeting took a little longer than it had at the other schools, so it seemed like that might be good news. But as the three of us walked back to his old Taurus, he told us that the answer from Briarcrest was pretty much the same as everywhere else: that Steve seemed like he could succeed there, but my grades were too much of a problem to let me in. What was different, though, was that Briarcrest offered us a possible solution.
There is an alternative school in Memphis called Gateway Academy, which is run by a local church and offers programs for kids in trouble or struggling badly in school to get their grades up. The Briarcrest administrators agreed that if I went there for a year and showed real improvement, it might be possible for me to start at Briarcrest the following year. It was a good enough deal for all of us. Steve could go to the new private school and I would get my grades up through the alternative school and be on track to join him at Briarcrest after a year.
That fall, we started a new routine: Tony drove Steve out to school in the mornings and I worked in Tony's body shop and studied with the Gateway materials during the day. Once a week on Wednesdays, I would go over to the Gateway campus for one-on-one instruction and to take tests on the material I was supposed to have studied on my own the week before. Their curriculum was set up this way to help students adjust to the discipline of regular school. The only problem was that I'd never even learned how to study, so I found myself looking at the books and trying to make sense of them, but feeling totally lost.
Steve was also having to work hard to stay on pace with his classes. He has always been a really smart guy, especially in math, but the level of academic instruction at Briarcrest was so much