 Julia had graduated about 10 years ago, so I was surprised when she sent me a message on Facebook, asked if she could come by my classroom during my planning period, said she needed to talk about some stuff. You've always been like a Dumbledore to me, she said. This is not remotely true. I'm much more like Hagrid, but she came. And for an hour, I listened to her talk about her parents' divorce and their ill health, about her depression, about her epilepsy bubbling back up and keeping her from holding down a job. I said, Julia, look, there's this Whitman poem in which he talks about all the bad stuff that's surrounding him in the world, the endless trains of the faithless and cities filled with the foolish and himself feeling foolish and faithless, and he asks what good he is amid all of this stuff. And then he answers his own question, answer, you are here that life exists and identity, the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. So, Julia, you've got a verse to contribute to. Even if life is treating you rough, you've got a verse to contribute. She snorted in disbelief, kept her eyes down on her shaking hands. And so I had a hunch and I followed it. I asked her if she'd been thinking about harming herself and she looked me dead in the face and said, every day, and I looked her back and said, Julia, I have had to bury 10 students in 18 years of teaching. Ryan and Blake and Mason and Sean and Jess and Laney and Callie and Paris and Jared and Brianna, you cannot be number 11. Promise me that. And she squeaked out a promise and she's kept it. Checked herself into a facility, gotten her meds straightened out. She's doing better. As public educators, we make lots of promises to our students, to master content and to think critically and to do well on tests. But there's one promise, a tacit promise that gets overlooked in all of those metrics and that is the promise of safety, of physical and emotional safety. Sometimes they need us to stand, to paraphrase Faulkner. The teacher can be one of the props, the pillars that help our students prevail in this world. Because they're our students, even after they graduate, they're still ours. When they're sincere, when they're obnoxious, when the world treats them badly, like it did my student Rob, Rob, a six foot, two tall muscular black kid who prior to his 11th grade year had been in and out of alternative schools, but this year is really busting his butt to keep his line, keep himself in line. He would ask his PE teacher if he could leave Jim during my planning period, so he could come into my classroom to work. He couldn't do homework at home because he was working till 11 at Burger King to help his parents out with bills. I'd step out of my room to go run something to the office or make some copies and I'd come back and there would be Rob, book open, reading Huck Finn or Frederick Douglass. Over Christmas break, a friend of his called Rob and asked him for a ride to work. Rob pulls up, friend gets in and pulls out a pistol, tells him to drive to someone else's house, and so a ride to work turned into accessory to armed robbery, 14 years. It's worth noting that a couple of years prior to this, a white student of mine with a well-connected dad got high on bath salts and assaulted a police officer and got an ankle monitor for a month. And this reminded me, as I am reminded so often of Langston Hughes' poem written in the form of a letter to one of his teachers, which he tells this teacher, I learned from you and I guess you learned from me, although you're older and white and somewhat more free. So here I am older and white and freer and I take Langston Hughes' advice and I start writing Rob letters and we get a good back and forth going. And in those letters I drop copies of poems, Langston Hughes, William Wordsworth, Edward Hirsch, Tupac Shakur. Did you hear about the rose that grew from the crack in the concrete? Proving nature's laws wrong, it learned to walk without having feet. Funny, it seems, but by keeping its dreams, it learned to breathe fresh air. Long live that rose that grew from concrete when no one else even cared. At some point someone snuck a cell phone into Rob and he texted two people while he was in, his mom and me sent me a picture of his GD certificate. And when he was released after two years for good behavior, he went home and took a long shower, changed some clothes, and then in his words, came home to the school. And there were hugs and there were tears. And then my coworkers rallied, my beautiful colleagues and we called our friends and we called connections and we called parents. And we found that man a job two days after he got out of prison. He learned to breathe fresh air and long live that rose that grew from concrete when almost no one else cared. So this is what we've got to do, teachers. We've got to take the things that we teach and weave them inextricably into the lives of whom we teach. Art teachers, show your students the divinity that is creating something. Science teachers, look at the human cell, how complete it is and remind your students that they are constructed of that same perfection. History teachers, tell your classes that for every great name that you study, there are thousands of the nameless, the anonymous fighters and dreamers and protesters that made those great names possible. Math teachers, I don't know, but I trust y'all to do it. Don't ask me to do that. I trust y'all to do it because they're ours. They're ours. That's why we affix that possessive pronoun to the front of their names. They're ours. Our students' lives exist, their identities, the powerful play goes on, and they will contribute a verse. We just need to give them the space to write it. Thank you.