I've spent 52 consecutive years inside a school building.
That's not exaggeration. That's my life.
First as a student, then as a teacher, then as an assistant principal, and on July, I will begin a new part of my career as the Director of a Career and Technical Education Center. I've coached teams, written tons of college recommendations, given thousands of second chances, and eaten more cafeteria pizza than most people would ever choose to admit.
But if you knew me in high school, none of this would've made any sense.
I was bored, angry, and lost. Thrown out of one high school. Stayed back the next year. Summer school every year. I graduated near the bottom of my class and had no idea what came next.
I didn't apply to college until someone casually suggested I look into the Community College of Rhode Island. I walked into the guidance office, asked for an application, and the counselor looked at me like I was out of my mind.
"Why would they want someone like you?"
That sentence, said in the middle of an ordinary day by someone who didn't care to see anything positive in me, almost ended my story.
I left that office embarrassed, ashamed, and fully convinced that every bad decision I'd ever made had finally caught up to me.
That's when I started planning exactly how I was going to end my life after school that day.
I wasn't acting out. I wasn't crying in a hallway. I was just walking, like every other kid in every other school who seems like they're doing fine until they aren't.
And then, by chance, I turned a corner and ran into Mr. Rouleau.
He didn't stop me because I looked upset. He stopped because he knew me. He paid attention. He saw past my sarcasm, past my record, past the story everyone else had already written. And he asked what was going on.
I told him about the guidance counselor.
Then he did something remarkable. He said something simple, something I still carry with me today. He told me I should go. That if I did well, no one would care what I did in high school. And most of all, that he believed in me.
That minute—the act of noticing, of caring, of choosing to see someone instead of dismissing them—changed everything.
If my guidance counselor doesn't say what he said, I never go into education at all. The truth is I did it out of spite. I became a teacher because I wanted to prove to every one of them who looked down on me that I could do their job better than they ever did.
And if Mr. Rouleau doesn't stop me in the hallway, I don't make it to the next day.
People outside education often think teaching is about delivering lessons and assigning grades. But what I know—what millions of students know—is that the most powerful work teachers do isn't on a syllabus. It's in the spaces between.
It's in the pause for a conversation before or after class.
It's in the moment you call a student by their name so they feel seen.
And known.
It's in the way you decide that the kid walking by matters enough to ask what's going on.
Every school year consists of a million of these moments. Most go unnoticed. But occasionally, one of them changes everything.
This #teacherappreciationweek, I want us to appreciate the full picture.
Yes, thank a teacher for the lessons, for the feedback, for the hours and hours of planning and grading. But don't stop there.
Thank them for the compassion that isn't in any job description. For the minutes they give when no one's watching. For the belief they offer freely, even when the world has given up on someone.
If you're a teacher, I want you to hear this, not just today, not just this week, but every day.
You are seen.
You are appreciated.
And you have already made more of a difference than even you know.
That minute you gave someone in the hallway?
The one you've long forgotten?
It might be the reason they're still here.
It was for me.