I was a college dropout.
Going back to school after dropping out required a powerful level of perseverance. Normally a person can be anonymous. They can wander back into an institution as a number on stat sheet, just one more kid that decided to follow through. My path was more conspicuous. At some point I made enemies in important places. One such person was a dean who was hell bent on keeping me out of school. Despite passing the clear requirements for reentry, this dean chose to deny me reentry. I fought the decision, thinking at first that this was some sort of clerical error.
It was not.
Slowly I assembled a team around me. I found dedicated educators to whom I plead my case. I wanted to get back into school, because I knew that what I was doing with my life was far less than what I was capable of.
I learned that governments, education systems, corporations, media outlets, sports franchises—all of these institutions are run by people, and often people are as human, flawed, and even petty as the rest of us. I was raised in a society where we hoist persons of authority unto a pedestal, somehow separating the human from the position and just recognizing the position. This negates the fact that they are humans, and all humans are emotional and instinctual beings.
I believe students look at authority figures in the same way I was taught to. They build expectations around the symbol and around past interactions that they’ve had with others in the same roll, but they fail to recognize that each is an individual that needs to be approached as such and dealt with on a non-uniform basis. This too is not always true. Some of us are locked into the trappings of power and the etiquette that goes with it, but if I can teach one lesson to my students it would be to know who their teacher is as a person first.