By Asher Lehrer-Small, Photo: YPIE College Zone, The 74, May 9, 2022
A decade ago, Samuel Wallis was teaching in a small city in the Mississippi Delta when students’ phones started going off. News of a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut stopped his class in its tracks.
“It was the middle of the school day … and we just had a crying session together,” recalled Wallis. “I was teaching social studies … like, I’m not going to [keep] teaching them the causes of World War II on that day.”
Looking back on that sad day now, Wallis says his emotional and unguarded experience as a Teach for America fellow strengthened those students’ trust in him and forged a classroom bond that ultimately made him a more effective instructor. It altered his approach to the classroom and the trajectory of his Mississippi work — and it was a powerful lesson about the value of deep connection that stayed with him when he later returned to the city of his childhood: Yonkers, New York.
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