A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives. ~ Jackie Robinson

Never underestimate your impact on others

We all live busy and complicated lives, and in our jobs we are often stressed and rushed, so we don’t always take the time we would like to work with or help people as much as we would like. For this reason, especially those of us who work in service industries like education, we often feel like maybe we haven’t had the impact that we would like. That can often lead us, because we don’t often get feedback from the people we assist, to thinking what we do just doesn’t matter that much. The thing is though, that we often don’t realize the impact that we do in fact have on people.

I was reminded of this during this last week when I surprisingly got a text message from someone I met at Mardi Gras in New Orleans last year. During Mardi Gras season in New Orleans, people think that the whole thing is the drunken frat party of Bourbon Street which is what makes the news. They think Mardi Gras is all about getting loaded and women lifting up their shirts to have beads thrown to them. And while that certainly is the scene on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter during Mardi Gras, it’s not what Mardi Gras is all about. A huge part of Mardi Gras, and my absolutely favorite part are the parades.

Mardi Gras parades are fantastic, bands, floats, dance groups and of course more beads and other throws tossed your way than you could ever imagine. What people really don’t understand is that on a Mardi Gras parade weekend there may be three to five parades a day. These parades can start at nine or ten in the morning and end at nine or ten at night. On the big Mardi Gras weekends, with various reasons for delays (accidents, weather, etc…) parades sometimes don’t end until midnight or one in the morning. And, NONE of the major parades go into the French Quarter or down Bourbon Street.

In the neighborhoods of New Orleans where the parades go through, it’s a family affair. Very few drunks, no women flashing anyone but lots of families and kids, lots of tourists and locals there for the whole day and often weekend to enjoy the parade. People bring chairs and coolers with food and drinks and it’s a very festive atmosphere. People often stake out the same areas for the parades over a weekend, so a particular corner or area on Charles Street ends up becoming a temporary community. And, if you find someone on their own, your little group will often adopt them, it’s a very friendly and welcoming environment. Last year, the group that had adopted me also adopted a young woman. We got to talking and at some point started talking about career and burnout and I told her about the way I’ve handled that in my career. By taking sabbaticals every few years, quitting and traveling for a year before working again. This week I got a text from her, apparently our discussion had an impact, she’d actually taken a sabbatical and was now looking to head to California for a job. So just that one conversation, during a Mardi Gras parade, had an impact on her life. Sure, she had to be in the right place in her life for that impact to happen, but that one conversation had an impact. You never know how a little kindness or advice can impact someone.

This happens a lot in education, those of us in education have all had the experience of having an old student coming back and thanking us about something we did that really helped them out or changed their lives, it’s what makes this business worth working in, even with all the madness. That doesn’t mean it’s all rainbows and roses, sometimes getting to that place is really hard and tonight I want to tell you about a student I had at the University of Tennessee (UTK).

The student I want to talk about was a young African-American woman in my biology class at UTK. She was a terrible student. She was late to class, didn’t pay attention, late with assignments and failed the tests with grades in the 40’s and 50’s. Something I always tell people, is that no one is ever the bad guy in their own story and that was the case in this instance. She decided to file a complaint with the college claiming that I was discriminating against her because she was black and a Christian. She claimed I was harshly grading and holding her to unrealistic expectations because she was black and because as a Christian she didn’t believe in evolution, which was a key topic in the class.

The claims of course had no merit. I had literally volunteered to teach this class in the McNair Student Program, a program that worked to help support African-American students be successful. And, almost every one of my students were Christians, many who didn’t believe in evolution and some who were quite hostile to the concept. So, if I was failing students for that, there would have been a large number of failing grades in my class which was not the case. So the student took their complaint to the lab teaching coordinator, a wonderful woman who came to me and asked if I’d be willing to let her review all of the students work. I happily agreed.

After reviewing everything, and realizing I had in fact graded the student fairly easily despite their failing grade, she met with the student. After relaying the lack of merit to the complaint the student wanted to go to the Biology department chair and the coordinator talked her out of it because he was an old school hard core type and would actually be upset at how easily the student had been graded. So the investigation yielded nothing, the student failed and that was the end of it, or so I thought.

Fast forward two years, I was serving as the Interim Assistant Director for Academic Advising while working on my Phd research. So one night in the winter, I worked late and was leaving the office after dark in the old, brick, dark building we were located. As I exited the office I heard my name called, it was the student. I was terrified, it immediately hit me that I was alone with her, in a dark hallway and she could claim anything happened and I had no witnesses to prove otherwise. So I said hello and made a beeline for the stairwell, my thought was it was well-lit and full of windows and increased my odds of having someone else in the space. I was convinced this was some sort of ambush to set me up for any of a number of claims. She sensed exactly what I was doing and as I rocketed by her she grabbed my arm and said, “stop Mr. Kane, I want to talk.” I was convinced I was totally screwed. And that’s when she said I want to thank you.

I stood there incredulous, sure this was some sort of trick. She went on to thank me for being the first person to ever call her out on her bullshit, for standing my ground and holding her accountable. She said it had been a watershed moment for her. Since that time she’d become a better student and a better mother and in fact was working at the university as a research assistant in the survey research institute. I said your welcome, that I was happy she was doing well and slipped away, still honestly convinced it was some sort of trap.

Of course, the universe loves to mess with me and part of my research included doing a public survey in Knox County related to people’s values about forests. As such I was working with the university’s survey research institute, and they assigned me an assistant, it was the student. It would turn out she had been sincere, she was truly grateful and felt bad for the way she had treated me, she even turned out to be a pretty good assistant.

We often don’t get these 360 moments in education, usually you just go through the hard parts and never know if standing by our values, and standing our ground and doing what’s right really paid off. So I hope what you’ll take from tonight’s post is this, stand your ground, stand for your values and do what’s right. It may be hard in the moment, it may feel like it would be better to just roll over and get along, but in the long run you’ll be doing people a disservice if you do. So be the good person, take the high road and not just you, but the people you encounter will have happier days my friends. ~ Rev Kane