The thing I can't say at a dinner party is that the best teaching job I have ever had is inside a prison.

Before this I was in a public high school for eleven years. I left in 2016 after a year I don't want to describe in detail — it involved an administration, a parent, and a complaint that was eventually dropped. I took the corrections job because it was the only education posting within forty minutes and I assumed it was a step down and a stopgap.

Here's what nobody tells you about teaching in a prison. The classroom is the best classroom in the state. I have between nine and fourteen men. They chose to be there — it's voluntary, and there's a waiting list. Nobody is on a phone, because there are no phones.

Nobody's parent emails me. No one is performing for anyone, because the social currency of the yard does not operate in my room, and they've all agreed to that without ever saying it out loud. If I explain something badly, somebody tells me.

If I explain it well, the room knows it.

I had a man named — I'll say R — who came in at forty-one unable to read past about a fourth-grade level, which he had hidden for twenty-five years with a set of strategies I found genuinely brilliant. He had an entire system. He passed his GED in nineteen months.

I was in the room. I have watched a lot of kids get diplomas and I have never seen anything like the thing that happened on that man's face.

And now the part I actually came here to write.

The recidivism numbers for people who complete education inside are good. Really good. I know the studies, I quote them in funding meetings. But I've been doing this nine years and I know, personally, by name, where about sixty of my students ended up, and it isn't the study.

Some of them are fine. A few are more than fine — I have one who's a diesel mechanic and one who's a youth counselor, and I think about them when I need to. And a lot of them came back. R came back. Twenty-two months out, a violation, and he was in my hallway again, and he wouldn't look at me.

Here's the thing I've never said to anyone in my family: that didn't make me doubt the work. It made me understand that I'm not doing the work I thought I was doing. I thought I was doing an intervention. I'm not. I'm providing a room where, for ninety minutes, four days a week, a man gets to be a student instead of an inmate.

That's the whole product. Whether it reduces his odds afterward is somebody else's measurement and mostly depends on housing and a job and a hundred things I don't touch.

That reframe took about five years and it's the only reason I'm still here.

What's hard: the lockdowns, which cancel class with no notice and no makeup, sometimes for weeks. The paperwork that treats me as a security risk because I bring in pencils.

The fact that I am not allowed to know what any of them did, which is correct and which I have violated exactly twice in nine years by looking someone up, both times at three in the morning, and both times I regretted it and it changed how I taught him and I could feel it changing.

And the thing I can't explain to people: when I tell someone at a party what I do, there are two reactions, and I've gotten very good at predicting which one. Either "that's so important" in a voice that closes the subject, or a question about whether I'm scared.

I've never been scared in that building. Not once in nine years. I was scared in the high school.

I'm fifty-one. I'll do this until they make me stop.