Why I'm an Educator: Tyler Thigpen, Ed.L.D.'17

I’m 21 years old, and this kid is asking me seriously for a job. 

It’s hot, dry, and brown in the plaza of a pueblo joven (or “young town”) on the outskirts of an 8 million-strong Lima, Peru. No running water, no electricity, and thousands of people making life in a desert. 

A good number of the American suburban high school kids I pas­tor have made the southward trek with me and are playing soccer on la cancha. 

With no police around, I watch the group. A guy with a yellow shirt, yellow hat, and yellow bike rides by selling ice cream I know will make me sick. It’s as I’m declining the offer that I see him, a kid, walking up to me with three other, smaller kids. 

“Hola. Please,” he says, handing me a dirty piece of notebook paper. The English is so poor, I can’t understand it and instead say, “Hablo español, amigo. Dime.” 

So he tells me. 

Name’s Juan Carlos. Dad’s an alcoholic and works in distant Chil­ean mines, coming home once in a while with nothing to show for the journey. Mom’s sick with something I can’t translate, and bedridden. Hermanitos at his side he claims to care for — two girls, 3 and 5, and a quiet boy, 10, whom he reveals, and I now see, has síndrome de down. 

Juan Carlos is 12. 

He finishes his spiel, and I brace for the ask. Money.

Or if he’s creative, a plane ticket to the States.

But Juan Carlos is a better man than me.

The discovery wallops me when he asks me to put him to work so that he can support his family.

No words.

My younger sister is here with me and I have her take over the con­versation. I duck into an alley, alone, and cry for 30 minutes.

I cry because I do not know how to help this kid in the long term.

But really, I cry because this kid has courage, and I am afraid.

Of looking foolish. Of never measuring up. Of lies I’ve told. Of not knowing normal.

I, too, am the son of an alcoholic.

Weeping still, I remember Viktor Frankl, whom I’ve read weeks ear­lier: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Leaving the alley, and not knowing what else to do, I give Juan Carlos some money. I decide to aspire to his strength. And for the rest of my life to learn how to help communities long term and not just one-off.

Growing up pre-Juan Carlos, I glean from my mom and dad that doing well in school will mean I can do anything I want when I’m older. 

My dad manages his alcoholism, passed down to him from his par­ents and theirs, and works as an interim financial consultant for rural health care systems all over the southeast United States. Addressing challenges of multiple bucolic hospitals, he changes jobs more fre­quently than his peers. I look up to him for his adaptability and will­ingness to provide. And I listen carefully when he credits a college degree, a unique distinction in his family second only to his sister’s, as the catalyst for a respectable career. 

My mom, also the second in her family to graduate college, thrives as an elementary school teacher, working in Title I schools and teach­ing English to children of immigrants. When her students struggle or lack basic things, I am sometimes annoyed and eventually proud she engages our family to reach out and help. 

In fact, the first funeral I ever officiate is of the mother of Mari­ana, one of mom’s students whose family has immigrated from Mex­ico. Mariana’s mom dies suddenly, leaving her husband, Mariana, and two more children. Over hymns and Bible verses, we grieve together in the closet the local funeral home lends out to families who cannot afford the usual payment. Worried they won’t make the funeral, I am relieved when not just my mom but many other teachers and admin­istrators come to help this family mourn.

For years, Mariana and her family receive support from that and other bands of teachers. And around the time I decide to stop work­ing at a church and start working at a school, where there are numer­ically more kids I hope to help, Mariana graduates. 

I am beginning to believe good education can position people to win their future. 

Naïve, I grow alarmed observing not all education is good. 

In year two of teaching Spanish at Georgia’s largest public high school, I’m asked to teach classes for all the students at the school that have failed Spanish the year before. 

My first day with them I say, “How many of you knew you would be in Spanish again today?”

No one raises their hand. 

Uneasily, “Honestly how many of you do not want to be here?”

Everyone raises their hand. 

As a teacher and later principal, I make it habit asking students the reasons some disengage. The material isn’t interesting, the material isn’t relevant, and when am I ever going to use this? are top replies. Finding so much detachment haunts me, because of the promise of a good education. So I search for new ways. 

I witness a high school in Georgia drop a fierce subservience to a bell schedule, organize themselves in groups to solve real-world problems, and eventually compel 85% of the student body to write op-eds in favor of the approach. Astonished, I watch seniors, during their final semester of high school, spontaneously celebrate by run­ning down a school hallway and high-fiving classmates because of a school project they have a say in creating. 

I see ways that captivate young people better than what most schools do now, and I resolve those ways are scalable. Why should this generation of students have to wait for the adults in the room to catch up? 

Today, I am in education to help update the approach and en­gage a generation. Some, like Mariana, will blossom from reassur­ance in the face of pain. And others, like Juan Carlos, already have enormous strength and courage and just need the chance to trans­late their hard work into progress, to choose their attitude and then their own way.

Tyler Thigpen, Ed.L.D.'17, is head of The Forest Schools and the Institute for Self Directed Learning, both in Fayetteville, Georgia. He is academic director at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education