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“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested,” wrote philosopher and essayist Sir Francis Bacon. Bonnie Riley, Ed.M.’58 agrees, adding that great literature provides the best nourishment for the soul. She says that the young men she teaches at the Cheshire County Correctional Facility, in Westmoreland, New Hampshire, turn toward great works for sustenance. “When you get stripped down—which is what jail does to you, both physically, and in terms of your self-respect—you begin to reach for the big things,” she says. Riley brings what they need within arm’s reach.
She says her students ask for love poetry, Greek mythology, and Shakespeare. “They are hungry to figure out what they should do in their lives,” she says. “They relate to the fact that Hamlet isn’t perfect. He gets into a lot of trouble. He knows a lot about violence and depression; those things make sense to them.” After 43 years as a classroom teacher—in public and private schools, preschool through graduate school, in the United States and in Africa—the 87-year-old, semi-retired educator explains that she called the Department of Corrections nine years ago because she had some free time and she “needed to teach.” Since then, in weekly visits, she has been offering literary insight to a growing number of 17-to-25-year-old men. “I try to offer anything that opens the mind to all the glories.”
Most of her inmate-students come from broken homes, and many have not finished high school. That is why Riley also tutors her students in the verbal portions of the GED. “These are people who have had failure, failure, failure, and they don’t quite understand why; they wish it weren’t that way, but they also don’t quite know how to get it right.” Helping her students detangle this sort of profound confusion takes many years, at best. Riley has come to terms with that. Her students’ progress will always be delayed—by meetings with lawyers, by court dates, by moves to different prisons. She has mastered the balance of maintaining hope while letting go of a teacher’s need to see a substantial change. One young man received a GED under her instruction and was soon after released from the correctional facility. Now he is in the state prison, struggling with ongoing drug addiction. Even so, he’s written to her asking for new books to read—a small but certain success for her. “What I can do is worth doing—whatever difference it makes,” she says. “You come to understand these things. That’s the wisdom of being quite old.” The wisdom of experience equally fuels her enduring, youthful vitality
for teaching. “It’s perfectly crazy to be a teacher, isn’t
it?” she asks laughing. “Even in the best case, you’re
never going to get there. You never finish. What would 'being finished'
mean?” About the Article
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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