Empower. John Spencer
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entire goal was to go unnoticed. Fly under the radar. Keep away from the Cool Patrol (the people who ran the school’s social hierarchy).
I had one friend, this kid named Matt. We were two nerds in a pod.
And fortunately for me, he had perfect attendance year after year.
So that was my system: find one friend and hang out with him and fly under the radar.
And it worked—until one day it didn’t.
One afternoon, he was gone from school. Nothing serious. He had a cold. But I remember looking out at the sea of students and thinking, I hope one person invites me to their lunch table.
It didn’t happen.
I waited for an eternity, paralyzed by fear. Finally I tossed my food in the trash and hid out in the bathroom, which might be the grossest place in school to hide out.
But here’s the thing: My plan had worked. Nobody had noticed me. And it felt horrible.
Despite all of this, I had two teachers, Mrs. Smoot and Mr. Darrow, who saw me as a person.
They knew I cared about social justice and baseball and history, so they invited me to do a History Day project.
At first it was fun (if a little overwhelming). I had to plan the entire project and track my own progress. I had to figure out what questions to ask and where to find the answers. I had to narrow down my topic to something I cared about—in this case, Jackie Robinson and the racial integration of baseball. Then it became terrifying.
I wrote letters to newscasters and made phone calls to former players. I remember picking up the phone, my hands trembling as I read aloud my pre-recorded script and waited for the stranger to respond. I eventually worked on a slide presentation. (Back in the day when you had to take pictures and go to the drug store to have them converted into little plastic slides.)
However, the most nerve-wracking moment occurred when I sat in a radio studio recording my script. I would play the giant magnetic tape back and use a razor to cut it and Scotch tape to splice it together. I listened to my voice and hated it.
At one point, I threw my hands up in the air. “I’m not doing this,” I said.
But Mrs. Smoot looked me in the eyes and said,
Those words stuck with me forever.
I finished the project, and it continued to be terrifying. I remember the moment I presented to my classmates, and one of the members of the Cool Patrol started a slow clap. At first, I thought he was mocking me. But as others cheered, I realized something.
I wasn’t invisible.
I went on to present at the state and national competition. It was a powerful experience.
And the most powerful part of it was the ownership. I had never owned my learning like that before.
That year had a lasting impact—one that continues even now. Mrs. Smoot’s influence shapes how I teach and how I parent and the creative work I do on a daily basis.
I became a different person—not because of the program or even the process but because of a teacher who saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself.
That was empowering.
I became a maker.
And while I didn’t recognize it at the time, that experience ultimately shaped why I became a teacher.
Visit EmpowerBook.co to get practical resources for empowering our learners. Join the discussion online using the hashtag #empowerbook.
Louis7 was born in 1809 in a small village just east of Paris. He was the youngest of four, and his mother and father worked the countryside making things out of leather. By all accounts, Louis had a wonderful experience growing up, even after the accident that occurred when he was only three years old.
In his father’s workshop, Louis was trying to make some holes in the leather using a tool called an awl. The awl looked like a sharp-pointed screwdriver and was used to make such things as belt holes. While he was pressing it into a piece of leather, the awl slipped and caught Louis in the eye. He was rushed to be seen by surgeons, but the doctors could not save his eye, and they put a patch on it. Weeks later Louis’s other eye became infected, and by the age of five he had lost all sight.
In part because of his young age, Louis did not realize that he had lost his sight. His parents said that he would ask why it was so dark, as the child seemed confused about being blind.
Louis’s parents did not hold him back. He was not treated as disabled and instead learned to travel around the village and country paths with various canes his father had created for him. He continued to learn, tinker, and create despite the loss of sight. His teachers and local villagers continued to help him learn until, at the age of ten, Louis attended the Royal Institute for Blind Youth.
While there, Louis learned about a communication system called night writing, devised by Captain Charles Barbier of the French Army. The system, which was a series of complicated dots and dashes impressed into paper for communicating without light (and without sound), was extremely complex.
However, by the age of fifteen, Louis Braille had taken these ideas and developed his own system for reading and writing for the blind, aptly named the Braille System.
Louis Braille went on to be an inventor, professor, and musician who continued to fine-tune the Braille System until his passing in 1852. Still, Braille did not become widely used until years later when it was seen as a revolutionary way to adapt languages across the world.
Louis Braille is only one example of what happens when learners are encouraged and motivated to solve problems that matter to them and dive into interests that are relevant to their own lives.
There was every reason in the world for Louis to live a life devoid of creating, designing, building, and inventing. He was not from a wealthy family. He had lost his vision at a young age. He lived in a time where many saw education as a privilege and not a right.
But Louis’s story can serve as a reason for us to focus on giving kids the knowledge and skills to pursue their passions, interests, and future.
Truth #1 is the reason we educate students. It’s for their benefit.
But it only matters to our students when they