Dear Mrs. Williams,

I've been meaning to write this letter for awhile now. You made my first year teaching high school harder than it needed to be. Instead of a mentor you were a tormentor.

I don't need to recount all the wrongs. They don't matter. What matters is the realization of your motivation behind them. Many mentors would say they needed to be tough to make sure a rookie teacher has a solid start. You took it to a whole new level. There were rumors of teachers before me falling apart and the teacher after me being on the verge of quitting. The faculty knew what you were, yet were powerless to stop a tenured teacher. Maybe you had terrorized them in the past, because surely co-workers that had known you for years would have spoken up as friends to point out your folly. Maybe there was fear there too. I have no idea what was happening in the county offices. They said they had many complaints about you, yet their hands were tied until a more egregious offense.

My theory about you is that you are a small person in search of power. That's why you enjoyed the horse races so much. Imagine those tiny jockeys just controlling those massive animals. You were short, you were a woman and you were black. I can only imagine what growing up in the decades before mine were like. They left you with a taste of resentment that you had to pour out on those you had power over. There was a limit to what you could do to the students, because the parents in that county had all the say. So you brandished your power over the fledgling teachers.

What did you accomplish? Did you weed those that aren't meant for teaching from the herd? Or did you do the scholastic community a disservice by leaving us with a bad taste in our mouths for teaching?

I loved teaching, and I loved the students. What turned everything sour was my experience with you and the resulting realizations about the power of the faculty. If you don't have their support, a hard job becomes a burden instead of a challenge. Teaching is indeed a career where dinosaurs rule. If you happen upon an 'old skool' school, the tenured have the power and refuse to see any new ideas as good.

Even now though, years later, I smile at the memory of what my students accomplished. I feel that it reflects on me as a teacher. And nothing pleases me more about my relationship with you than to know that the students I taught, many of them your former students, passed the Standards of Learning under my care after they had failed through you. Somewhere, I managed to give them a spark of learning you couldn't impart. Napoleon has her Waterloo, she just doesn't know it yet.

I had a dream last night...

Actually, it has been a recurring dream. I'm lying down, all I can see is what's in my line of site. I can only move my head, my body doesn't seem to do what I want it too. I can't get up, I can't walk. For some reason, even words don't work for me. All I can do is cry, my lungs bursting, throat hurting and tears streaming across my face as I turn my head frantically from side to side, looking for help.

I can hear someone there, but can't see them. I know it's someone I love. I need that person but nobody is coming to me. My cries are coming in gulps as I try to swallow the air. Nothingnobodynothingnobody. I am alone and helpless. Swallowed by fear, swallowing fear and expelling it in great bursts of sobs, I have no concept of time. Five minutes, ten minutes, a lifetime. All I know is I am alone and helpless and can't understand why. Where are the people that love me? That should be caring for me?

If I was a quadriplegic, whoever was responsible for me would be reprimanded for neglect. After all, I can't get up to go to the bathroom, to eat, to seek out the most basic of needs- human comfort.

But I'm not handicapped, or even an elderly person in a nursing home. I'm a baby. This wasn't my dream. It's a reality for millions of babies left to cry it out every night. Doctors, caregivers, parents, grandparents- they use the euphamism "cry it out" to describe training a baby to sleep "properly". But what is the "it" the wee ones are supposed to be crying out? Their hearts? Hope? Faith in their loved ones?

For what? So we can have some skewed version of 'correct sleep' with an infant, instead of recognizing their needs might be different that our wants. Might supercede our wants. We slap the label "independence" on it and go about in our proud way. Yes, we as a country need nobody, and it starts with our infants. Look at how they can sleep on their own. Never mind what we've done to their bodies and minds to get them there.

Too bad it's all a lie. Nobody is independent. We all need somebody. It's interdependence we should be striving for. Why aren't we teaching to ask for help with grace? To offer help with compassion? Instead, we are teaching our children from the youngest age that to cry for help will bring none, and that will sap away at their compassion when they get to a place that they are able to give help. I sure hope it's not when one of their parents is bedridden and crying for a little love from their grown child- grown too busy for them.