Good fences make good neighbors, not good education.

A couple of months ago, the boyfriend brought home another dog. Though Edison, who we affectionately call "Eddy," was already 7 months old and mostly grown, he was the epitome of a new puppy. He ate everything, eatable or not. He woke me up at the crack of dawn nearly every morning by scratching whatever unfortunate part of me was sticking out of the covers. He wouldn't come in from the yard when it was raining until he was COMPLETELY covered in mud. No manners, no commands, no good.

Perhaps at first I was biased because I had raised Jasper and Helen from puppies. They know how to sit, lay down, and speak on command. They know what I mean when I say "Go to bed!" And they know how serious I am just by the tone of my voice. So needless to say, I had a hard time warming up to Eddy. By the time I did warm up to them though, I think he already knew that he wasn't my favorite. Whenever I was home alone, Eddy wouldn't come out and play in the living room with me and the other dogs. He laid in Michael's room until he got home. When Helen and Jasper cuddled up in bed with me, Eddy laid on the floor. It broke my heart that I had judged him so harshly and hadn't put the effort in but he seemed to have accepted it and just waited for Michael.

Last week, I was sitting at home alone catching up on Dr. Quinn. All of the dogs were in the fenced back yard. Just as Dr. Mike rushed off to rescue passengers injured in a train wreck, someone anxiously knocked on my door. A nervous man who I recognized as one of my neighbors all but shouted before the door was even completely opened: YOUR DOG GOT OUT! I asked him to describe the dog and knew immediately that it was Eddy. It seemed that he had found a way to jump the back fence and had landed in the apartment complex on the other side.

I grabbed the leash and followed the man to where he'd last seen Eddy and there he was: sitting, staring up at the fence, trying to figure out how to get back inside. He saw me and immediately hung his head in shame but I couldn't be angry. He was TRYING to get back to where he was supposed to be, he just needed help. I rubbed his ears, told him he was a good boy, and picked up all 50 pounds of him and carried him home.

Since then, Eddy has learned to sit and he doesn't jump on my head anymore when I bend over to pour food into his bowl. He follows me all over the house and lays at my feet in the bed now (much to Jasper's dismay.) So what made the difference? The only thing I can think of is that when Eddy was stuck on the outside of the fence I went after him. When I came to his rescue, maybe he realized that I do care, that my house is his home, and that he can be a part of what's going on inside the fence.

More than one of my wise professors has told me, "Kids don't care what you know, until they know how much you care." How many of our students today are just like Eddy? Sitting outside the fence, knowing that they need to be inside, they NEED an education, and wanting to be inside but not knowing how to get there? As teachers, it's our job to go after those students outside the fence. They need our guidance to help break down those fences that stand between them and their education: learning disabilities, lack of motivation, family responsibilities, sickness, worry, doubt, fear. They need our encouragement to know they can learn and succeed on the inside. And they need to know that they're not just another test score, IQ, or ID number; that they're cared about and they deserve an education as much as anyone else.

When I was student teaching, I taught a student named *Mark. When I met Mark, he was 15 years, 324 days old. Mark was only in school because the law said he had to be. I didn't know anything about him when I started teaching him, so I taught him the same as the rest of the students. I had the same high expectations and the same amount of respect. Though at first he was reluctant, he became really interested in Horticulture. He did well on his tests, answered questions and participated in class often. Even though it was first period, he rarely missed a day. When he DID miss a day, I always bugged him until he completed the makeup work. Though more than one teacher in the school had said that he was just biding his time until the day he could drop out, I was optimistic. What I didn't realize is that even though I had gone after Mark, everyone else had given up on him. He had been outside the fence for so long that no one else thought it was even remotely possible for him to make it inside the fence... and no one tried to find out.

The day that Mark turned 16, he came to my first period class, then he left the school and never returned. And I can't help but wonder, if more teachers had gone after him and would go after those like him, how might things have been different on both sides of the fence?