I had to go to prison to get my foot in the door at Connors. Extreme, yes, but I had been teaching at Bacone for a year, so I felt prepared. Teaching at Bacone made me get tough. Sometimes I felt like I was in the movie Dangerous Minds...which was a bit unexpected since it is a Christian university. I was teaching a lot more classes than an adjunct instructor typically does because Bacone operates under its own rules as a private school. I had 18 credit hours of day and night classes. One particular night class was full of rowdy football players who were pretty much convinced that they were too cool for school. It was a challenge, to say the least, to keep their attention, to keep them in line and, as one of the most unpopular instructors with the athletes, to feel safe walking to my car at night with no security and no lights. By the time I left Bacone, I knew how to wear my game face, how to get respect as a young female instructor and how to shut down any attempts at leveling or sexual advancement. Only after I learned those things could I even hope to reach some of them through writing assignments and discussion of literature.
Compared to my experience at Bacone, Eddie Warrior Correctional Center was friendly. First of all, it is a women's prison. Second of all, only the best behaved inmates can enroll. That's not to say that I didn't have some students who needed to be removed. It was a little difficult for me to push out of my mind that some of these ladies were guilty of crimes I couldn't imagine, but I did push it out. I forced myself to turn a blind eye to my visions of being attacked with a pencil or being dangled from the 2nd floor window.
After I graded their first essays, my perception of the world changed. Most of them wrote very emotional stories about how they came to be in prison and how they missed their children. I came to see them as women...women who had made some very big mistakes. Some of these women were girls, not yet 20 years old. I felt very blessed to have had such supportive parents who always did their best to protect me from myself and from any danger they had the foresight to help me avoid. Still, as I look back, there were times in my teenage years when I put myself in situations that could have led me down a path of destruction. I couldn't help but see that every one, even Martha Stewart, is just one big mistake away from being inmate number 0001-2345.
Behind every tough girl's eyes, there was pain.
They were ready to make a change in their lives. They were tired of failing, tired of drug addiction and tired of their cycles of abuse. They were fiercely determined to soak in every lecture. They participated passionately in every discussion. They worked on each essay like it was the most important thing they'd ever done. They were coming to the realization that they were in fact good enough, smart enough, and fully capable of success. I've never seen eyes like theirs before or since.
I came away feeling like they educated me more than I had them. I learned compassion, humility and gratitude in a most unlikely place, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.
