Azizi-

It was refreshing to be teaching students in Ethiopia back in the 1960's while I was a Peace Corps volunteer. They had no racial inferiority such as Black students evidenced in Los Angeles (where we practice taught) felt. Oh, to be sure, there were various levels of ethnic disrcrimation going on, and on levels where "we" as outsiders were oblivious to, but not the Black/White racial discrimination that we were more familiar with.

Maybe that experience made me a better teacher when I was working with inner city Black students in Detroit in the 1970's. But we also survived as teachers because we had a corps of Black students who we knew were watching our backs. I do recall vividly the time we were taken for a "tour" by some of our favorite students via car; it's all like a quick flashing slide show: 12th street with people hanging out on their front steps, bars with prostitutes pacing up and down the street, a restaurant with blazing torches from some island in the South Pacific, row upon row of burned out or abandoned houses...

And the stories some of those students would write. They still haunt me, but my former students still have to live with those stories as personal memories.

I, of course, could leave at any time and eventually did. That was a distinction that separated me from most of my students, even some of the brightest ones. There were so many ways that my students could fail to break out and I was teaching in a special program designed to help them do just that. The stress finally became too much for even our best students, who were actually coordinating the program. They were bought off with special scholarships when the University pulled the plug on the program.

You see, the major problem for the University was that our program enrollment kept doubling every quarter, and Black students were getting good grades and expecting to be accepted at the University. The teachers were all volunteers, donating their salaries to pay for the students tuition, and eventually the University administrators freaked out at the consequences of our success. For a while it seemed as if there might even be a massive demonstration (buses had been chartered, big signs printed) but that's when our student leaders, wisely perhaps, decided to accept their scholarships; somewhere there is a file with all the "exhibits."

So it goes!

Charley Noble