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of my buddies together and said, “Let’s throw Dede a baby shower.”
    â€œAre you crazy?” one asked. “How would we do it? Who would come? What purpose would that serve?”
    I got the same reaction from some teachers who wanted Dede’s problem to quietly go away. I was determined to embrace her and let her know that we accepted her predicament. I can’t say that I was bent on making a dramatic statement about race and class. I was neither reflective nor focused enough to arrive at that conclusion. But I did know how it felt to be excluded. The least we could do as a community was alleviate Dede’s sense of isolation.
    With friends and parents, we reserved a room at a restaurant. People arrived with gifts. We had a great time. Dede beamed.
    After Dede left school to have her baby, we never saw her again on campus. We assumed that the school had not invited her back. We also assumed that Dede would become a statistic: a single, teenage mother who dropped out of school and went on welfare. It would be a tragic and cautionary tale of a promising life gone wrong.
    Except it didn’t.
    When I arrived at Wellesley College my freshman year, whom did I run into but Dede! Not only had she made it through high school and continued to achieve, but she did so in such a way that earned her admission to one of the most prestigious colleges in the country.
    Seeing Dede buck the system and defy the stereotypes and assumptions changed me. She came from one of the city’s roughest neighborhoods. She had all of the odds stacked against her. But through her experience, I began to realize that environment did not determine fate. At least, it didn’t have to.
    I was lucky to be born into my situation. She was unlucky to be born into hers. Did it have to stay that way? Was her fate sealed because of her circumstance? As it turned out, school determined her future possibilities. If kids had the will and the potential, and they had the opportunity to attend schools with good teachers, they could become great successes despite the obstacles.
    Dede’s story confirmed what I learned from Mary Weiss—that education could make a difference in a child’s life, regardless of how she comes to school.
    I F MY COMING-OF-AGE WAS a gradual but steady change from a shy Korean child to an independent, perhaps bossy teen, I truly left my comfort zone in Saskatchewan.
    During my junior year in high school, I worked at a summer camp for kids on a Native American reservation in Canada. I had no idea what to expect. The first morning I woke up, and I couldn’t find a plug for my blow-dryer. And the people were laughing at me, because we were in a trailer on the Indian reservation. “Sweetheart,” one said, “there are no plugs to plug in your hair dryer. You can put that thing away for the rest of your trip!”
    No hot showers, either.
    It was the first time I had seen and experienced abject poverty. Children were living as they might have in the nineteenth century. It was so foreign to me.
    Some of my counselor colleagues were foreigners, in fact. I got to know Manny, a German man whose specialty was clowning, so he wore different clown costumes around the reservation. Helen was a Canadian athlete who taught the kids how to play soccer. What could I teach them? I fretted until I came up with something we could do without needing too many supplies (which were in short order): origami.
    Every day I set up a table and invited children to make swans that we would string up in trees, or frogs that would jump, or intricate squares we could blow up into spheres. First the young ones would take seats, then the older kids would drift over, and pretty soon I would have a full table. Teaching the kids to make these shapes taught me my first lesson about good instruction—clear instructions. When I told the kids, “Fold the paper in half,” they’d do so somewhat haphazardly. That would